[Image Processing Engineer Column] Hidden Registers
There is a fear that no one has tried cutting-edge technology.
With the evolution of software, automatic updates have become common, but hardware has yet to achieve the ability to swap out components later.
Designers sometimes choose to "hide" certain features as a result of various considerations, so I would like to introduce this.
Registers set in LSI or FPGA are provided for external "configuration." This "configuration" can easily lead to the misunderstanding that "the more settings available, the better," and if there are many settings, it becomes necessary to understand the meaning of those settings and consider the order in which they are applied. Ideally, it would be best if no configuration were needed at all, and the device could start operating simply by being powered on.
However, there are unexpected usage methods and environments that differ from what the designers anticipated. Therefore, it becomes necessary to expose the "configuration" to accommodate these situations.
Having many options is not necessarily good, and having too few can lack versatility. This is a dilemma we face.
We have often benefited from this, but there have also been times when we were troubled by the lack of publicly available information. The FPGA we provide is developed with these kinds of concerns in mind.
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