FPGA limit of number of configurations?

Question

i'm interested in technology of FPGA. I would like to buy one to test hardware implementation/acceleration of few algorithms, but I think there must be hardware limitation of how many times can I reconfigure one board or single matrix cell. Is there such limitation? If so, what is an average, and what are best vendors providing such products?

Answer 1

The big three FPGA vendors are:

1. Xilinx http://www.xilinx.com
2. Altera http://www.altera.com
3. Lattice http://www.latticesemi.com

By far the most popular FPGA technology is SRAM based. What this means is the FPGA device configuration is volatile. Each power cycle the FPGA is loaded from a non-volatile storage location (usually flash). Due to this architecture the FPGA are effectively infinitely reconfigurable, I have never seen a limit published or referenced. It is just not something you worry about FPGAs. You may have to worry about how many times you can reprogram the device(flash memory for instance) where you are storing the configuration file for how many times you can expect to reprogram it. Though in practice you probably do not have to worry about this.

Any of the referenced vendors would be a good choice assuming their devices and development boards fit your exact need.