GoKawiilMany of the world’s most advanced electronic systems—including Internet routers, wireless base stations, medical imaging scanners, and some artificial intelligence tools—depend on field-programmable gate arrays. Computer chips with internal hardware circuits, the FPGAs can be reconfigured after manufacturing.
On 12 March, an IEEE Milestone plaque recognizing the first FPGA was dedicated at the Advanced Micro Devices campus in San Jose, Calif., the former Xilinx headquarters and the birthplace of the technology.
The FPGA earned the Milestone designation because it introduced iteration to semiconductor design. Engineers could redesign hardware repeatedly without fabricating a new chip, dramatically reducing development risk and enabling faster innovation at a time when semiconductor costs were rising rapidly.
The ceremony, which was organized by the IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section, brought together professionals from across the semiconductor industry and IEEE leadership. Speakers at the event included Stephen Trimberger, an IEEE and ACM Fellowwhose technical contributions helped shape modern FPGA architecture. Trimberger reflected on how the invention enabled software-programmable hardware.
Solving computing’s flexibility-performance tradeoff
FPGAs emerged in the 1980s to address a core limitation in computing. A microprocessor executes software instructions sequentially, making it flexible but sometimes too slow for workloads requiring many operations at once.
At the other extreme, application-specific integrated circuits are chips designed to do only one task. ASICs achieve high efficiency but require lengthy development cycles and nonrecurring engineering costs, which are large, upfront investments. Expenses include designing the chip and preparing it for manufacturing—a process that involves creating detailed layouts, building masks for the fabrication machines, and setting up production lines to handle the tiny circuits.
“ASICs can deliver the best performance, but the development cycle is long and the nonrecurring engineering cost can be very high,” says Jason Cong, an IEEE Fellow and professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles. “FPGAs provide a sweet spot between processors and custom silicon.”
Cong’s foundational work in FPGA design automation and high-level synthesis transformed how reconfigurable systems are programmed. He developed synthesis tools that translate C/C++ into hardware designs, for example.
At the heart of his work is an underlying principle first espoused by electrical engineer Ross Freeman: By configuring hardware using programmable memory embedded inside the chip, FPGAs combine hardware-level speed with the adaptability traditionally associated with software.
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