FPGAs have been around since the early 1980’s. Introduced in 1984 by Xilinx, though the term was popularized several years later by Actel, around 1988. Prior to the development and release of the FPGA, Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) were all the rage. These built-to-order customized circuits were able to fulfill the customer requirements, were low cost, high speed and high capacity. When FPGAs were introduced they compared poorly on every metric, and yet became wildly successful. In large part this was due to the cost metric. ASICs required up front non-recurring engineering fees per customer, however, FPGAs reduced this cost by allowing a more general purpose device to be mass produced without the non-recurring engineering fees. By producing these devices en-masse the high cost was spread amongst all of the customers rather than a single customer.
Beyond the cost comparison, the FPGA also allowed for something else that ASIC, the ability to program logic after the initial release of the design. This allowed for companies to implement fixes to the logic much faster and roll out changes without needing to develop entirely new chips.
As time progressed the number of look up tables increased from less than a hundred, to hundreds of thousands. This increased the functionality of the devices while the prices continued to drop. By the late 1990’s automated synthesis and place and route was a necessity, without these tools the design challenges of laying out an engineering design in the fabric of an FPGA would simply be too great.
Modern devices are now commonly used as hardware accelerators, data interconnects and really just a swiss army knife that can be deployed to solve any number of engineering challenges.
For example part of my PhD research topic at the time of writing is developing and FPGA design capable of incorporating the data streams of both split beam sonar with a DIDSON acoustic camera.
An excellent resource to learn more would be an IEEE paper written by Stephen M. Trimberger called “Three Ages of FPGAs: A Retrospective on the First Thirty Years of FPGA Technology”. Which can be found at: