Field Programmable Gate Arrays

I've been looking atFPGA's and ordered my own board to arrive in the mail pretty soon I hope. The difference between a normal CPU and an FPGA is best explained here. Notice how FPGA's are independent and act directly on the signal, whereas the CPU typically executes one instruction per 'clock cycle', but then may need to retrieve values from memory, put this into a register, execute another instruction, push back from register to memory and so on. Once you think about it, it's already pretty amazing that a single CPU can be so darn fast.

FPGA's however do not typically need to do this. It requires a totally different thinking about computing, but benefits from using much simpler logical elements wired together in different ways. This configuration of logic elements is what provides it with an application.

The FPGA's limitations are more the number of elements (and thereby the functionality it can possibly embed), because it's program is embedded in hardware and isn't read from memory and then executed by the same device. This is also how they are very different. FPGA's are also not programmed with a standard programming language (since it's inherently parallel and the program is basically the configuration how logic elements wire together). Another language called VHDL is used for this purpose, which does not require you to think about all things in parallel (one of the reasons why computers are easy to program is because we can think about events serially, as happening one-by-one. Multi-threaded computing is already getting more complicated, because you need to imagine how threads and processes may interact together and the results these may create).

You can build a host of very interesting things on FPGA's. One is an M&M sorter :), but a not too complex board can already simulate a C-64 and run the game Commando.

Of course, the FPGA gets very interesting when you need to process a large, complex signal. Think about video signals for video compression for example or speech recognition. Lots of research is undertaken there at the moment. But simpler implementations are also possible, for example PID controllers for temperature regulators etc... I do think though that FPGA's are slightly overkill and possibly unnecessarily complicated.

An alternative to FPGA's are Arduino boards, which are basically CPU's again and can also be programmed in C. So a lot of fun when you want a new kind of hobby.