In the early 1990s, FPGAs were primarily used in telecommunications and networking.
The 1990s were a period of rapid growth for FPGAs, both in circuit sophistication and the volume of production. By 1993, Actel (now Microsemi) was serving about 18 percent of the market. Īltera and Xilinx continued unchallenged and quickly grew from 1985 to the mid-1990s when competitors sprouted up, eroding a significant portion of their market share. Casselman was successful and a patent related to the system was issued in 1992. In 1987, the Naval Surface Warfare Center funded an experiment proposed by Steve Casselman to develop a computer that would implement 600,000 reprogrammable gates. The XC2064 had 64 configurable logic blocks (CLBs), with two three-input lookup tables (LUTs). The XC2064 had programmable gates and programmable interconnects between gates, the beginnings of a new technology and market. Xilinx produced the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array in 1985 – the XC2064. Īltera was founded in 1983 and delivered the industry's first reprogrammable logic device in 1984 – the EP300 – which featured a quartz window in the package that allowed users to shine an ultra-violet lamp on the die to erase the EPROM cells that held the device configuration. PROMs and PLDs both had the option of being programmed in batches in a factory or in the field (field-programmable). The FPGA industry sprouted from programmable read-only memory (PROM) and programmable logic devices (PLDs).
IMPLEMENT 3 STACKS IN A SINGLE ARRAY SOFTWARE
Many FPGAs can be reprogrammed to implement different logic functions, allowing flexible reconfigurable computing as performed in computer software.įPGAs have a remarkable role in embedded system development due to their capability to start system software development simultaneously with hardware, enable system performance simulations at a very early phase of the development, and allow various system trials and design iterations before finalizing the system architecture. In most FPGAs, logic blocks also include memory elements, which may be simple flip-flops or more complete blocks of memory. Logic blocks can be configured to perform complex combinational functions, or act as simple logic gates like AND and XOR. Circuit diagrams were previously used to specify the configuration, but this is increasingly rare due to the advent of electronic design automation tools.įPGAs contain an array of programmable logic blocks, and a hierarchy of reconfigurable interconnects allowing blocks to be wired together.
The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware description language (HDL), similar to that used for an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC).
Not to be confused with Flip-chip pin grid array.Ī Stratix IV FPGA from Altera A Spartan FPGA from XilinxĪ field-programmable gate array ( FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured after manufacturing.
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