A Brief History of FPGA

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTGroup ]

Headings…
We are all makers
A Brief History of FPGA

Have You Seen Our Live Makerspace Tours Yet?

Auto extracted Text……

In the easy-to-follow book Make: FPGAs — Turning Software into Hardware with Eight Fun & Easy DIY Projects, author David Romano details the ins-and-outs of the hyper-configurable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) boards and explains how — and why — to get started with these advanced devices.
A field-programmable gate array is an integrated circuit whose fundamental hardware functionality can be programmed in the field after manufacture.
There are many reasons a design team will consider FPGA technology in industry.
For example, in many silicon IC design companies, FPGA-based platforms are used for what’s called “shift left” testing, where a new SoC (system on a chip) device is mapped to FPGAs early in the design phase, in order to begin software integration long before the actual silicon device is manufactured.
Another example of where FPGAs are considered a viable solution in industry is where the design requires having multiple hardware personalities in the same footprint.
By using an FPGA in the design, the customer was able to download different test instruments to the same hardware, essentially having multiple instruments in one hardware device.
For the hobbyist, an affordable, off-the-shelf FPGA platform can be used in some very interesting and fun DIY projects.
The designer can also use logic blocks, connected together through the interconnect matrix, to implement logic functions.
Before there were FPGAs, you needed to use dozens of discrete ICs on a circuit board, or sometimes even hundreds of ICs on multiple circuit boards, to accomplish the hardware functionality you can achieve today with one FPGA device.
For example, today you can create the entire Pac-Man arcade game on a single FPGA device, including the game software.
The configuration of an FPGA device is accomplished through programming the memory cells, which determine the logic functions and interconnections

Read More..
AutoTextExtraction by Working BoT using SmartNews 1.0299999999 Build 26 Aug 2019