Linaro’s open source 96Boards spec was adopted by Arrow for the Chameleon96, the first ARMv7 96Boards entry, and the first FPGA-enabled 96Boards SBC.

The SBC runs Debian Linux on a Cyclone V SE SoC from Intel PSG (Programmable Solutions Group), the new post-acquisition name for Intel’s Altera FPGA unit.
The Cyclone V combines dual 800MHz Cortex-A9 cores with a modest FPGA subsystem with 110K LE performance.

Programmable devices are being adopted in more market segments, but they still haven’t been included in major SoCs. That could change.

Systems on chip have been made with many processing variants ranging from general-purpose CPUs to DSPs, GPUs, and custom processors that are highly optimized for certain tasks. When none of these options provide the necessary performance or consumes too much power, custom hardware takes over. But there is one type of processing element that has rarely been used in a major SoC— the FPGA.

Solutions implemented in FPGAs are often faster than any of the instruction-set processors, and in most cases they complete a computation with lower total energy consumption. However, their overall power consumption is higher, and performance is slower than custom hardware. In addition, they use a lot more silicon area because the FPGA is a fixed resource, so enough of it must be put onto a chip for what is believed to be the worst-case usage scenario.

The standalone FPGA market currently is dominated by two companies, Xilinx and Altera (Intel). Part of the reason for this is they do not just produce chips. FPGAs require a complex ecosystem to make them useable. This ecosystem is very similar to those required for supporting processors. The transformation from FPGA to eFPGA adds even more complexity to this ecosystem because it requires a customized toolchain for each IP core that is licensed.