Tim Davis's blog

First, with apologies to the awesome Ray Charles and his hit song, Hit the Road Jack, from which I borrowed this blog's catchy title, I want to introduce the idea of creating a roadmap for your next FPGA development project as a simple way to keep every project team's eye-on-the-target(s).

Who knew that transistors would have such a transformative power over our daily lives? We carry billions of them around in our pocket, on our wrist, in our computers. They are ubiquitous but also invisible.

I have rescued a few designs during my 25+ years at the helm of Aspen Logic's FPGA/ASIC contracting business. Reasons abound for the causes of the failures but there are three areas that need consistent focus:

1. Designers give little up front thought to logic reset which leads to insidious, hard to find bugs
2. Management typically assigns a cost of $0 to bugs because FPGA devices are re-programmable so no time is allocated in the schedule for squishing them
3. Lack of a road map for features and fixes which makes decision making on large design efforts difficult