— Ch. 1 · Origins And Early Development —
Field-programmable gate array.
~4 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
Altera delivered the industry's first reprogrammable logic device in 1984. The EP300 featured a quartz window in its package that allowed users to shine an ultra-violet lamp on the die. This process erased the EPROM cells holding the device configuration. Xilinx produced the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array in 1985. The XC2064 had 64 configurable logic blocks with two three-input lookup tables. These early devices sprouted from programmable read-only memory and programmable logic technologies. Companies like Altera and Xilinx grew quickly from 1985 to the mid-1990s. Competitors began eroding their market share by 1993 when Actel served about 18 percent of the market.
Architectural Evolution And Design
Modern FPGA families expand upon capabilities to include higher-level functionality fixed in silicon. Examples of these include multipliers, generic DSP blocks, embedded processors, and high-speed I/O logic. Higher-end FPGAs can contain high-speed multi-gigabit transceivers and hard IP cores such as processor cores. These cores exist alongside the programmable fabric but are built out of transistors instead of LUTs. Vendors such as Tabula and Xilinx introduced 3D or stacked architectures to shrink size and power consumption. Xilinx stacks several active FPGA dies side by side on a silicon interposer. This heterogeneous construction allows different parts of the FPGA to be created with different process technologies. Altera uses Intel's embedded multi-die interconnect bridge technology to connect other dies to its monolithic FPGA die.