Role of FPGA in Internet of Things Applications

This paper discusses the role of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Benefits of FPGAs over ASICs and microcontrollers are emphasized to justify the industry's inclination towards more IoT-FPGA based applications. Moreover, this paper highlights the internal hardware architecture of the FPGA which is the main enabler for the reconfigurability feature of FPGAs. This feature is what makes FPGAs more valuable when compared to the fixed architecture of microcontrollers. Next, several IoT-based applications are discussed in which FPGAs show superiority. These applications include interfacing FPGAs with IoT-based edge devices and system on chip (SoC) FPGA devices with a special focus on Microsemi's SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA. Finally, a conceptual model of a novel video transcoding application that can make use of the enormous processing power of SoC FPGAs is proposed.