September 19, 2025
Talk Title:
“FPGA Architecture Evolution -- Opportunities in the Next Decade”
About the talk:
FPGA architecture has evolved dramatically over the past 30+ years, expanding from simple use cases of board glue logic to complex acceleration workloads in high-speed networking, wireless communications, and embedded compute applications. This talk will first briefly look at how major FPGA components advanced over time to serve continually evolving FPGA markets with increasingly stringent performance and power requirements. We will then highlight some of the key software and hardware innovations in the latest Agilex generation of Intel FPGAs which enabled the highest single-generation performance and power efficiency improvements in Altera/Intel's history. Finally, we will look towards the next decade of FPGA evolution and discuss what lessons of the past can teach us about upcoming opportunities and challenges for the next-generation FPGA platforms.
About the speaker:
Scott Weber is a Principal Engineer and member of the FPGA Core Architecture group at Altera/Intel. He played critical roles in the development of partial reconfiguration, FPGA NOC architecture and pathfinding of 3D FPGA architecture. He joined Altera in 2014. Prior to Altera/Intel, he was at Tabula working on synthesis, analytical placement and debug. Scott received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Berkeley and B.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He holds over 40 granted patents.