Practical FPGA Programming in C

Chapter 2. A Brief History of Programmable Platforms

You may think that writing software for programmable hardware is a relatively new phenomenon, but the history of programmable hardware and related design tools is nearly as long as the history of the microprocessor. In fact, if you consider that researchers at companies including IBM, Intel, Texas Instruments, Harris Semiconductor, and others were experimenting with general-purpose computing using the earliest forms of programmable logic arrays as far back as the late 1960s, it's not much of an exaggeration to claim that the use of programmable hardware for creating what are essentially software applications may actually predate the birth of the microprocessor, which is generally accepted to ...