Building Embedded Systems: Programmable Hardware

© Changyi Gu 2016

Changyi Gu, Building Embedded Systems, 10.1007/978-1-4842-1919-5_9

9. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

Changyi Gu¹ 

(1)San Diego, California, USA

It was extremely important for us to always be at the leading edge and we felt that there’s no way that we could build a fab.

—Bernard Vonderschmitt, Cofounder of Xilinx

Now comes the “hard” part. The next three chapters are all about hardware, which covers a wide gamut of topics like FPGA, SOPC, LCD, etc. This chapter begins with an overview of the embedded hardware in general, followed by detailed discussions about FPGA and IP protection.

Hardware Overview

The scope of hardware can be very broad, as broad as anything that has mass (or weight). In that sense, things like mechanical enclosures ...