4 STORING STATE WITH THE FLIP-FLOP
Alongside the look-up table, the other main component in an FPGA is the flip-flop. Flip-flops give FPGAs the ability to remember, or store, state. In this chapter, we’ll explore how flip-flops work and learn why they’re important to the functioning of FPGAs.
Flip-flops make up for a shortcoming of look-up tables. LUTs generate output as soon as they’re provided input. If all you had to work with was LUTs, your FPGA could perform all the Boolean algebra you might want, but your outputs would be determined solely based on the current inputs. The FPGA would know nothing about its past state. This would be ...
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