There has always been hot discussion between what to choose, an FPGA or a conventional hard IP microcontroller.

It seems that FPGAs are going to rule in the future because of their flexibility, increasingly better power efficiency and decreasing prices. Often a soft processor is added in the FPGA design to get microcontroller like functionality along-with other concurrent processing.

FPGAs are concurrent. You can take sequential functionality like adding soft processor core. While the microcontroller as always sequential. This makes FPGAs better suited for real-time applications such as executing DSP algorithms. FPGA are flexible, you can add subtract the functionality as required. This can not be done in microcontroller. FPGAs are liked in military applications. There are two main reasons of that. The first is that FPGAs are hard-wired and the random attack of alpha rays can not destroy/corrupt the memory areas hence collapse the device functionality. The second reason is that the life time of FPGA based development is longer. It can be adopted for advanced chip is required. Microcontrollers change too often and there is lots re-work required to do in order to keep pace with changing technology. This is necessary to save the design from being obsolete. The development time in case of conventional microcontroller is, I think, shorter and that of FPGA takes time because you need to glue-up different modules yourself and test them to perfection before doing anything. In case of a microcontroller, the peripherals are readily available and you can choose the microcontroller with your desire peripherals. These peripherals are pre-tested thoroughly by vendor and you need not to worry about their functionality, just need to use them. You will find ready made open source softperipherals for FPGAs as well but still gluing them up and testing is as task. Microcontroller, up-til now, are power efficient. Microcontroller are low-cost, much lower than FPGAs. This is specially true for small applications and large quantities. Microcontrollers are available in easy to solder SOIC and QFP package like one of the 32 bit Stellaris microcntroller from TI is available in SOIC28. Many vendors have TQFP48/64 packages with enriched peripheral options. You have limited choice in case of FPGAs. Those of the class of Spartan4/5 and above need to outsource the PCB/PCBA services which is expensive, difficult to debug and out of the reach an entry level professional or hobbyist.

What if we use microcontrollers and FPGAs are used simultaneously? It happens! Infact some vendors like Altera, Xilinx, Atmel provide configurable logic along-with processor core as well. But for an electronics engineer (or the embedded systems developer) working on both the niches is really difficult. I remember that I had taken an FPGA course back in 2008 but could not fully utilize my training even now. This is because the expertise in microcontrollers are rarely going to help you in the field of FPGA unless you only do the embedded development and no advanced digital logic design. Also the HDL like Verilog may look similar to C in syntax, its very different in use and often confuses just after a session of C coding. The very mechanism of sequential microcontrollers and concurrent FPGAs is very different.

There are many other factors which decide what you choose. Like your company is a pure R&D or a services based company. You educational upbringing, some universities teach heavy FPGAs and DSP while other emphasize on microcontrollers. Your own personal interest and the level of your comfort. The nature of project, small volume cost insensitive or large volume cost sensitive. And, may be, most importantly the end application or customer requirement. There would many other pro and cons which you can search further on internet but, I think that, if your field demands heavy DLD work and lots of DSP is involved, use FPGAs, otherwise, use microcontrollers; although only you are the right person to decide what to do keeping all the above mentioned n the world of electronics and digital circuitry, the term microcontroller is very widely used. Almost every single device that is meant to connect and interact with a computer has an embedded microcontroller inside to facilitate the communication. The structure of a microcontroller is comparable to a simple computer placed in a single chip with all of the necessary components like memory and timers embedded inside. It is programmed to do some simple tasks for other hardware. A Field Programmable Gate Array or FPGA is an integrated circuit that could contain millions of logic gates that can be electrically configured to perform a certain task. The very basic nature of FPGAs allows it to be more flexible than most microcontrollers. The term field programmable already tells you that the whole FPGA device can be reprogrammed to do any logic task that can be fitted into the number of gates that it has. You can rewire all the logic gates to configure it to the task you had in mind. Microcontrollers already have their own circuitry and instruction set that the programmer must follow in order to write code for that microcontroller which restricts it to certain tasks. The flexibility of FPGAs comes at a price because they consume more power than typical microcontrollers, making them unsuitable for applications where power drain is an issue. Making an FPGA function in a certain role would also take a lot longer compared to microcontrollers because you would have to write all the code from scratch and convert it to machine language. With microcontrollers, you can buy packages that are geared towards a certain task and just program them to your exact specification relatively quikly. The price related to FPGAs can also be taken literally since using FPGAs could cost manufacturers way more than with simple micrcontrollers. Thats why FPGAs are usually seen in products that have a high degree of complexity but with only a low demand. Once the demand rises and mass production becomes necessary, the circuit is moved to ASICs like microcontroller where the production cost is less. Summary: 1. Microcontrollers are custom built mini computers in an IC while FPGAs are only composed of logic blocks that can be rewired electrically 2. Microcontrollers consume less power than FPGAs 3. FPGAs take a considerably longer time to set-up while there are ready built microcontrollers being sold for specific uses 4. Building devices with FPGAs are more costly than microcontrollers

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