Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Market

As per MRFR analysis, the global FPGA market is expected to grow significantly over the forecast period due to several factors. There are several factors contributing to this, including the Increased penetration of IoT to increase the demand, global infrastructure as a service market to add traction, FPGA deployment across the telecommunication sector for increasing the network bandwidth, and Efficiency of FPGAs over Asics. While certain factors like Security concerns with FPGA and Designing complexities has created restraining factor for the FPGA market. Nevertheless, the adoption of FPGA in smartphones and mobile devices and wearable and rising usage of FPGA in the automobile sector is expected to present lucrative growth opportunities for the players in the global FPGA market.

FPGAs have shown to be more power-efficient for IoT over the years as a result of research, development, and concurrent advances. The number of IoT connection devices has surpassed the number of non-IoT connection devices for the first time, according to the State of the IoT 2020 study. At the end of 2020, 11.7 billion (or 54%) of the 21.7 billion active connected devices worldwide were IoT device connections. This figure is predicted to hit 30 billion by 2025, or approximately four IoT devices per person on average. With IoT comes the promise of abundant innovation to help business models and improve the global industry in a variety of ways. The chip need for IoT devices has increased and is expected to climb further until 2032 due to the rapid expansion in the number of IoT devices and the development of electronic content in autos. To address this, manufacturers are pursuing balanced energy usage as well as chip shrinking. Furthermore, the demand for IoT grows with each passing year, indicating an increase in demand for semiconductors and other components.

FPGAs are progressively being developed by market manufacturers for integration into IoT devices and solutions. For example, Intel introduced the Stratix 10 NX, its first AI-optimized FPGA, which includes extended AI Tensor blocks (30 multipliers and 30 accumulators), integrated HBM memory, and high-bandwidth networking. The new device retains Intel's chipset architecture, and the FPGA part is fabricated using the company's 14nm technology. According to Intel, the new FPGA will provide up to 15% more INT8 computing than the Stratix 10 MX. In addition, the new chip has "up to 57.8 Gb PAM4 transceivers and hard Intel Ethernet blocks for excellent efficiency." In addition, QuickLogic Corporation stated in February 2022 that its PolarPro 3 series of low-power, SRAM-based FPGAs were now available to address semiconductor supply availability challenges. This extremely adaptable family has power consumption as low as 55 uA, a compact footprint in small packages, and die variations.

FPGA in smartphones and mobile devices have been a distant concept for many years now because of the physical size requirements of FPGAs. The accelerated pace of meeting new application requirements like adding bigger displays and more sensors to smartphones has led to very short development cycles smartphones and mobile device processors. The pressure to meet the schedules has led to increasing reliance on fully loaded application processors like Qualcomm Snapdragon or the TI OMAP. However, big chips like application processors take 2 to 3 years to develop which means the processors available in the market currently were defined two years ago. As soon as the processors get released, new requirements get added. This leads application developers to postpone their ideas till the processor compatible with their ideas gets released. FPGAs offer to bridge this gap in the processor development cycle. FPGAs are increasingly being integrated in smartphones and mobile devices due the flexibility they offer for application developers. The major factor which has affected the adoption of FPGAs in smartphones is the development of new FPGAs which are smaller in size like the ICEs FPGA product line by Lattice Semiconductor. Another major application FPGAs in smartphone is the management of sensor inputs. Application processor today have a small number of input ports to handle the input signals from sensors like the Qualcomm baseband processor –MSM8X55 which can only handle up to three I2C inputs. The number of sensors in mobile devices, on the other hand, is continuously increasing. FPGA have offered to bridge this gap between the number of input ports and sensors. FPGAs provide the flexibility to handle multiple sensors depending upon the device needs. HAWK MV-4000 high-performance smart camera is a recent example of FPGA in mobile camera devices. The camera makes use of FPGA to achieve real-time trigger responses based on input data from different sensors.

Data security in hardware devices has become a key concern with the increasing adoption of IoT technologies across verticals. FPGA and SoC devices are the primary target for security breaches in electronic systems of connected cars, medical devices, and home appliances. The bitstream encryption mechanisms used in FPGA devices such as Xilinx Virtex-4 and Virtex-5 are highly vulnerable to side-channel analysis attacks. Moreover, lack of security design and analysis toolkits for testing the integrity and security of FPGA designs has further created concerns regarding the security of FPGAs. Security analysis software developers for embedded systems are still focused on testing and improving the security of embedded system software. This has further slowed down the process of improving security in the embedded hardware which includes FPGAs and SoCs. The lack of security in FPGAs is expected to hamper the growth of FPGA market during the forecast period.

FPGA security breaches can result in intellectual property theft, damage to FPGA-based systems, and significant data loss. Each attack necessitates a unique set of security mechanisms. The major FPGA attacks can be classified into the following groups:

Cloning occurs when an attacker copies the FPGA programming. The bitstream is then used in an identical device and sold as their own. Cloning can be used to a full design or a subset of a design. Purchased cores, for example, which may be restricted by the vendor.

In overbuilding, the attacker is frequently a legitimate contract maker that constructs their own systems using an existing bitstream. The systems are then sold without the designer's permission. In both circumstances, the attacker does not need to be intimately familiar with the design.

A cybercriminal can reverse engineer the bitstream to obtain the circuit design. Reverse engineering attacks are used to recreate and comprehend the application's functionality. Furthermore, reverse engineering can be used to harm a programme by installing malware. Because FPGA suppliers do not use a standardised bitstream, reverse engineering attacks on FPGA bitstreams are difficult. As a result, each new FPGA device necessitates a fresh round of bitstream reverse engineering.

The attacker changes the original FPGA bitstream with their own during spoofing. This bitstream may contain cloning or reverse engineering components. Any FPGA-based system could be compromised by a faked application.

The attacker updates the application design during tampering. The attacker can use tampering to add logic that leaks information from a programme or disable components of the application. Because tampering involves set values in the bitstream, it may also necessitate reverse engineering.