Have you ever had to decide between a general purpose tool and one built for a very specific purpose? The general purpose tools can be used to solve many different problems, but may not be the best choice for any particular one. Purpose-built tools excel at one task, but you may need to do that particular task infrequently.
Computer engineers face this problem when designing architectures and instruction sets, almost always pursuing an approach that delivers good performance across a very wide range of workloads. From time to time, new types of workloads and working conditions emerge that are best addressed by custom hardware. This requires another balancing act: trading off the potential for incredible performance vs. a development life cycle often measured in quarters or years.
Enter the FPGA
One of the more interesting routes to a custom, hardware-based solution is known as a Field Programmable Gate Array, or FPGA. In contrast to a purpose-built chip which is designed with a single function in mind and then hard-wired to implement it, an FPGA is more flexible. It can be programmed in the field, after it has been plugged in to a socket on a PC board. Each FPGA includes a fixed, finite number of simple logic gates. Programming an FPGA is “simply” a matter of connecting them up to create the desired logical functions (AND, OR, XOR, and so forth) or storage elements (flip-flops and shift registers). Unlike a CPU which is essentially serial (with a few parallel elements) and has fixed-size instructions and data paths (typically 32 or 64 bit), the FPGA can be programmed to perform many operations in parallel, and the operations themselves can be of almost any width, large or small.
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