Applications of CPLDs

Applications of CPLDs

CPLDs offer high speeds and a range of capacities.
CPLDs are useful for a very wide assortment of applications, from implementing random glue logic to prototyping small gate arrays.

One of the most common uses in industry at this time, and a strong reason for the large growth of the CPLD market, is the conversion of designs that consist of multiple SPLDs into a smaller number of CPLDs.

CPLDs can realize reasonably complex designs, such as
graphics controller,
LAN controllers,
UARTs,
cache control, and many others.

As a general rule-of-thumb, circuits that can exploit wide AND/OR gates, and do not need a very large number of flip-flops are good candidates for implementation in CPLDs.

A significant advantage of CPLDs is that they provide simple design changes through re-programming (all commercial CPLD products are re-programmable).

With insystem programmable CPLDs it is even possible to re-configure hardware (an example might be to change a protocol for a communications circuit) without power-down.

Designs often partition naturally into the SPLD-like blocks in a CPLD.

The result is more predictable speed-performance than would be the case if a design were split into many small pieces and then those pieces were mapped into different areas of the chip.

Predictability of circuit implementation is one of the strongest advantages of CPLD architectures.