FPGA Insights has engaged in an exclusive interview with Harshad Kulkarni, Lead FPGA design engineer at Baker Hughes
Q1) Can you explain the benefits of using FPGAs over other types of processors?
I am Harshad Kulkarni. I am from Pune, India. From my educational background, I completed my Masters (MTech) from College of Engineering Pune.
I have around 8+ years of experience in FPGA development.
During this period, I got an opportunity to work on products that involve FPGA development. I worked on FPGA development from taking requirements from clients to on-board debugging and final client-end support.
Mostly I worked in domains such as FPGA Development for High-frequency Trading (HFT), industrial applications, defense, etc.
Q2) Can you explain the benefits of using FPGAs over other types of processors?
Advantages of using FPGA over processor:
The main advantage of FPGA is its parallel execution capacity and high operating speed over processors. Processor execution is always serial.
Particularly in latency-critical applications, due to the parallel execution capacity of FPGAs, they get preferred over processors.
Q3) What are the most significant trends observed in the FPGA industry over the past year? How will these trends shape the industry’s future?
A few of the trends as per my observations,
- Use of High-level languages such as C in the development cycle using HLS (High-Level Synthesis) tools.
- Advancement in EDA tools with the support of Machine learning to have more fine synthesis and PAR algorithms give the best results.
- Beyond selling only FPGA as IC, provide entire ecosystem support with new tools and FPGA-based boards.
Q4) How do you see FPGA development evolving to meet the demands of modern applications and complex workloads?
The same as I said in the previous question, apart from that FPGA capacity is increasing to support modern applications.
Nowadays FPGAs have more resources and higher operating frequency to support latency and area-critical applications.
Q5) Key drivers behind the increasing adoption of FPGAs in various applications and industries?
The requirement itself is the driving force to use FPGAs in industry.
Nowadays product complicity, its area, speed, and power requirement are so critical that FPGA has become the natural choice for the industry.
Q6) Sectors that stand to benefit the most from FPGA integration, and why?
A lot of industry sectors are benefited from FPGA.
Traditional sectors such as aerospace, defense, industrial, medical, etc. are there.
However, due to recent FPGA capacities, they are majorly preferred in data centers, and networking areas.
Q7) The role of FPGAs in accelerating AI applications and advancements expected in the near future.
The natural strength of FPGA as its reconfigurable structure, and parallel execution capacity gives it an ideal choice for AI applications.
Q8) Advice for students and professionals interested in pursuing a career in FPGA development to stay updated with the latest trends and technologies.
An evergreen career path for students with electronic backgrounds. There are plenty of opportunities across the globe for FPGA developers.
So if FPGA design is your passion then purchase any simple FPGA-based educational kit, download free Vivado OR Quartus software from the AMD OR Intel website, and start enjoying your experiments.
