[Image Processing Engineer Column] Hidden Registers
アポロ精工 アポロ精工 新横浜オフィス（旧ケーアイテクノロジー/旧市川ソフトラボラトリー）
There is a fear that no one has tried cutting-edge technology. With the evolution of software, automatic updates have become common, but hardware has yet to achieve the ability to swap out components later. Designers sometimes choose to "hide" certain features as a result of various considerations, so I would like to introduce this. Registers set in LSI and FPGA are provided for external "configuration." This "configuration" can easily lead to the misunderstanding that "the more settings available, the better," and if there are many settings, it is necessary to understand the meaning of those settings and consider the order in which they are applied. Ideally, it would be best if there were "no configuration required" and the device would "start operating as soon as power is supplied," making it user-friendly. However, there are unexpected usage methods and environments that differ from what the designers anticipated. Therefore, it becomes necessary to expose the "configuration" to accommodate those situations. Having many options is not always good, and having too few can lack versatility, which is a dilemma. I have often been helped by this, but there have also been times when I was troubled by the lack of publicly available information. We also face such dilemmas when determining the specifications for the FPGAs we provide. *News is distributed through our company newsletter.
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