CPLDs enable ease of design, lower development costs, more product revenue for your dollar, and the opportunity to speed your products to market...

CPLDs offer benefits that no other PLD can! Here's what they can do for you: Ease of Design: CPLDs offer the simplest way to implement a design. Once a design has been described, by schematic and/or HDL entry, a designer simply uses CPLD development tools to optimize, fit, and simulate the design. The development tools create a file, which is then used to customize (program) a standard off-the-shelf CPLD with the desired functionality. This provides an instant hardware prototype and allows the debugging process to begin. If modifications are needed, design changes are just entered into the CPLD development tool, and the design can be re-implemented and tested immediately. Lower Development Costs: CPLDs offer very low development costs. Ease of design, as described above, allows for shorter development cycles. Because CPLDs are re-programmable, designers can easily and very inexpensively change their designs. This allows them to optimize their designs and continue to add new features to continue to enhance their products. CPLD development tools are relatively inexpensive and in the case of Xilinx, are free. Traditionally, designers have had to face large cost penalties such as re-work, scrap, and development time. With CPLDs, designers have flexible solutions thus avoiding many traditional design pitfalls. More Product Revenue: CPLDs offer very short development cycles, which means your products get to market quicker and begin generating revenue sooner. Because CPLDs are re-programmable, products can be easily modified using ISP over the Internet. This in turn allows you to easily introduce additional features and quickly generate new revenue from them. [This results in an expanded time for revenue.] Thousands of designers are already using CPLDs to get to market quicker and then stay in the market longer by continuing to enhance their products even after they have been introduced into the field. Reduced Board Area: CPLDs offer a high level of integration (large number of system gates per area) and are available in very small form factor packages. This provides the perfect solution for designers of products which must fit into small enclosures or who have a limited amount of circuit board space to implement the logic design. Cost of Ownership: Cost of Ownership can be defined as the amount it costs to maintain, fix, or warranty a product. For instance, if a design change requiring hardware rework must be made to a few prototypes, the cost might be relatively small. However, as the number of units that must be changed increases, the cost can become enormous. Because CPLDs are re-programmable, requiring no hardware rework, it costs much less to make changes to designs implemented using them. Therefore cost of ownership is dramatically reduced. And don't forget the ease or difficulty of design changes can also affect opportunity costs. Engineers who are spending a lot of time fixing old designs could be working on introducing new products and features - ahead of the competition.