Where a calculator like ENIAC today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1½ tons.
—Popular Mechanics magazine, March 1949
Programmable hardware , as the book’s title suggests, starts to emerge as an important part of embedded system design. And more specifically, the SOPC (System on Programmable Chips) approach is moving toward the mainstream, thanks to decades of groundwork laid by the FPGA industry. Given all that, this chapter explains why SOPC makes more sense for your next big design. ...
