Winslow – ASIC, CPLD, FPGA Migration is not a Flight of Fancy (04/2022)

Whether it is progress or economic pressures that is behind the reality of discontinued ASIC, CPLD or FPGA packages a cost effective, Triple F (form, fit and function) solution is not that far away.
As the trend for extended product life continues to become more popular, the product development and the mid-life improvement programmes of electronic equipments are quickly vanishing into the future.

The environment the adapter will be applied to is considered at the beginning of the enquiry/design to ensure accurate compliance to critical elements and Winslow will work very closely with you in that respect. When appropriate, they will adopt DO254 guidelines for the design assurance of electronic hardware in airborne systems. The robustness of the adapter program has been proven over three decades in harsh environments including Civil Aerospace, Defence (air, land & sea), Rail (rolling stock & trackside), Oil & Gas (deep drilling & infrastructure).

One advantage of using an adapter to migrate to new, available technology is that during the design special requirements can be incorporated. Quite often the new design can provide product improvement as well as solving supply issues and the adapter route offers an excellent platform for this to be undertaken.

Issues commonly occur during procurement of the extended life product when devices such as ASICs (application specific integrated circuits), CPLDs (complex programmable logic devices) and FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array) are involved, and this inevitably means a bounce back to the design engineer’s desk from procurement when the original device cannot be found.