Seeking FPGA Design Services? Get 3 Free Tips

Outsourcing your FPGA design to an external, 3^rd party FPGA Design Service company can help you meet your deadline without having to invest in resources, tools or specialized FPGA design know-how. A good FPGA design services company can offer a complete turnkey service of developing an FPGA from scratch based on your specifications. Of course, taking this path also eliminates the burden of hiring staff with FPGA expertise, purchasing FPGA design tools, building FPGA knowledge and much more.

But how will you know you’ve selected the right service provider? Here are three qualities to look for when seeking an FPGA Design Service company:

1- Matching Core Competencies

Depending on whether you develop a networking or a consumer product, an FPGA code will have different implementation strategies and therefore will require a different skillset. A notworking product is all about high performance data crunching and therefore requires a design company that has FPGA designers with expertise in high speed data. A battery operated IoT product, on the other hand, will require an FPGA design team that has previous experience with optimizing design for low power.

By contracting an FPGA design company that already has experience with your application domain and technical requirements you will reduce the risk, time and cost involved with developing the FPGA. Ask them about their core competences!

2- Great Communication Skills

FPGA design companies can achieve their outmost if they fully understand your requirements, schedule, budget and expectations. While interviewing different vendors, try to find out how easy or difficult is to communicate with the team and how well they understand your product and vision.

Excellent communication will allow you to get to market on time and on budget with a bug-free FPGA. Poor communication, on the other hand, quite often leads to misunderstandings and major delays.

It’s not a bad idea to check yourself and your team: “how easy is to communicate with me and my team? Do I have all the required documentations?” (Obviously, if you don’t have the FPGA documentation ready, perhaps you should do so before engaging with an external entity.)

3- Long Term Support

FPGA, as the name implies, offers field programmability, hence allowing companies to update the FPGA code even when the product is deployed. This flexibility enables FPGA design engineers to fix bugs or enhance functionality while the product is located at customer premises.

This is one of FPGA’s inherent advantage. However, you’ll only be able to take advantage of this capability if you select an company that offers long term maintenance and support.

Alternatively, you will need to engage with a new FPGA design company every time you want to change the code or fix a defect in your existing design.