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Anyone can bake a cake, but while some chefs bake dry, uninspired bricks of dough, there are other chefs who make cakes we would die for. The ingredients may be the same, but the outcomes are so very different. This is also the case between average electronic products and world-class, market-changing products. One of the most recent technical sensations is the capacitive touch screen. But what makes some touch screen-based products amazing, while others get such poor reviews?

The consumer handheld market is growing by leaps and bounds. With more processing power and increased support for more applications, portable products are cross-pollinating with traditional computing systems even as the product life cycle has decreased considerably in this market segment. As a result, especially in this era of economic slowdown, it is imperative that new products meet the time-to-market window to gain maximum acceptance. A decrease in product life cycles requires a reduced development cycle and an increased emphasis on reusability and reprogrammability. The emerging handheld market is also seeing interesting trends in which each individual device in a family has lower volumes but there is more customization across the series of devices, effectively upping the total unit volumes. The key challenge then becomes how to develop a system that is widely reusable and also customizable. These requirements have led designers increasingly to turn to the FPGA for handheld-product development. The FPGA has become more powerful and feature-rich, while gate counts, area and frequency have increased. FPGA development and turnaround cycles are considerably shorter than those of custom ASICs, and the added advantage of reprogrammability can make the FPGA a more compelling solution for handheld embedded systems.