The traditional approach to develop a digital system was
to use a set of interconnected digital integrated circuits like
counters, buffers, logic gates and memory. That task required
lots of analysis, testing and the need to adapt the design to
the hardware’s inherent limitations (speed, response time,
power consumption, etc.) which resulted in capped
headroom for development.
Also, every design change implied a whole analysis but
sometimes the prototyping hardware wouldn’t allow any
expansion without a considerable –and most times
expensive- upgrade.
A the present time, technological advance has brought
new options like programmable logic as Complex
Programmable Logic Devices (CPLD) or Field
Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) with more sophisticated
simulation and design verification environments, which
enable engineers to reach new levels of complexity and
robustness, while greatly reducing the time between
development and implementation.
Also, those advances let engineers focus on the
application needs, rather than to fit the system onto existing
hardware. This way, one can develop a system that can be
optimized for manufacturing on a single chip, with the
capacity to add or remove modules according to the
requirements in the future