FPGA Insights has engaged in an exclusive interview with Yadu Krishnan, FPGA Engineer at Caliber Interconnects
Q1) Can you provide an overview of your organization and the services/products it offers?
My organization aims to create products with the help of FPGAs that can be useful for Artificial Intelligence tasks
Q2) Can you explain the benefits of using FPGAs over other types of processors?
The ability of FPGAs to quickly reprogram and with its parallel processing capabilities make FPGAs stand out
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?
I started my career in 2019, at that time when I worked on using FPGAs for edge AI processing, that concept was pretty new. Very few were only working on that and it was really a difficult task to implement them. Now almost all FPGA manufacturers are aiming to produce FPGAs that support this. With the introduction of Kria boards by Xilinx, these tasks have become much easier now.
Q4) How do you see FPGA development evolving to meet the demands of modern applications and complex workloads?
FPGAs with SoC helped them to do many tasks in the processor too along with FPGA. Now with the introduction of SoM, it has good processors as well as DPUs which are capable of producing comparable results with GPUs
Q5) Key drivers behind the increasing adoption of FPGAs in various applications and industries?
FPGAs have really helped a lot of small-scale industries. Industries that develop customized products for each customer really benefit from FPGAs. If you want to create an ASIC for a particular task, it often requires to produce in a large number of quantities. These ASICs can’t be modified for each of the customers, So that’s where FPGAs come into place
Q6) Sectors that stand to benefit the most from FPGA integration, and why?
As I mentioned earlier, small and medium-scale industries are benefited more from FPGAs. They can specially cater to the needs of their customer and modify their product for each of the customers. So with some FPGAs, they can make different applications for different customers
Q7) The role of FPGAs in accelerating AI applications and advancements expected in the near future.
FPGAs will replace the use of GPUs in the near future. FPGA gives good performance like GPU, but at the same time, it really costs much cheaper than them. We can really get rid of complex cloud-based servers with FPGAs and it also helps in protecting privacy as data won’t be sent anywhere for processing.
This also helps in bringing technologies to remote areas where the internet is not available.
Q8) Ensuring the security and integrity of FPGA designs, especially in sensitive applications like finance and defense.
Those fields use very critical and crucial data which can be misused if gotten into the wrong hands. With the implementation of edge processing by FPGAs we can ensure that data is not sent anywhere far and it will be processed in the same place, where it is captured. This gives more data security and data privacy
Q9) Advice for students and professionals interested in pursuing a career in FPGA development to stay updated with the latest trends and technologies.
The whole VLSI industry is expanding day by day. So it’s crucial to be updated with new technologies and products. It’s expected that India will enter into semiconductor manufacturing soon, this will really attract a lot of job opportunities at the same time. So even if the market is really low now. You can use this time to upgrade yourselves. So that you will be in high demand at that time
