Total cost of ownership (TCO) consistently ranks as one of the top three reasons that manufacturers report for choosing FPGAs. This is because FPGAs are the best way to lower your overall costs and develop highly profitable industrial products.
Figure 1. An FPGA-based Platform Delivers a Variety of Benefits: High Performance, Total Integration, Complete Flexibility, Design Re-Use, and the Lowest Possible TCO
Figure 1 illustrates an example where an FPGA-based platform is more desirable than platforms based on discrete components such as microcontrollers and digital signal processing (DSP) devices. With FPGAs, one board, such as the Industrial Networking Kit (INK) featuring Altera's Cyclone® IV E FPGA, can be used in many different applications; only a change in code is required to adapt it to various environments and applications.
TCO decisions are constantly influenced by key automation and process control trends, such as the following:
- Factories are transitioning from proprietary networks to Ethernet networks to take advantage of Ethernet performance and standard equipment
- Industrial Ethernet and fieldbus protocol standards are still evolving, making it a challenge to support multiple protocols
- Factories need more efficient equipment to save energy and reduce costs
- Factories are increasingly required to include functional safety features in their equipment, which adds to design and certification complexity
FPGAs give you a huge advantage in industrial applications. You can program an FPGA with a new hardware configuration, and thus change the functionality to meet new product requirements immediately—in the field, at the warehouse, or on the production line. Industrial applications such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human-machine interfaces (HMIs), industrial communications and I/Os, motor control, video surveillance, and machine vision use FPGAs as a highly integrated alternative to discrete components, thus lowering TCO.
You can use Altera® FPGAs to accelerate performance, integrate system functions, adapt to changing standards, and prolong the life of your product. There simply is no better way to minimize your long-term costs and create highly profitable products.
Related Links
- Whitepaper: Five Ways to Build Flexibility into Your Industrial Applications with FPGAs
- Whitepaper: Lowering the Total Cost of Ownership in Industrial Applications
- More Industrial whitepapers
- Webcast: Three Reasons to Use FPGAs in Industrial Applications
- Webcast: Achieve Lower Total Cost of Ownership for Industrial Designs
- More Industrial webcasts and videos
- Products page (devices, software, IP, kits, support, and literature)
