Whats an FPGA?
Field Programmable Gate Array: Its like a blank chip: Any digital circuit you can think of can be fit into an FPGA. FPGAs come in sizes from 1000 logic gates to 10 million logic gates. It used to be that FPGA designs were done in schematic format, however, todays FPGA designs usually use a hardware description language(HDL) to define the circuitry within the part. The sign FPGA design is written entirely in VHDL. Other hardware description languages include Verilog, Abel and (the newly created) Handel-C. Look around the web for more information about FPGAs and HDLs. FPGA manufacturers: Xilinx (60-70% market share), Actel, Altera, Cypress, Quicklogic, others Xilinx and Altera are SRAM-based meaning that the chip is blank at power-up; the design itself resides in some sort of PROM. The FPGA loads the design from the memory after power is applied. Actel and (I think, although Im not sure) Quicklogic are fuse or flash based: the design is burned into the FPGA using a programmer. These part
