Getting Started with FPGAs

INTRODUCTION

In my first job out of college as an entry-level electrical engineer, I once worked on an old design that had a timer circuit on it. Using a simple resistor and capacitor, the circuit would wait for 50 milliseconds (ms) to elapse, then trigger an action. We needed to change that 50 ms timer to 60 ms, but this small change required a monumental effort: we would have to physically remove the capacitors and resistors from hundreds of circuit boards and replace them with new ones.

Fortunately, we had a team of field programmable gate array (FPGA) designers who came to the rescue. With their help, we were able to implement the same ...