June 1, 2022
FPGA - history and historic FPGA devices
I was going through a box of junk and found a bag with three small
circuit boards with some Burr Brown parts and a Xilinx XC2064 device
on each board.
It turns out that the XC2064 was the worlds first FPGA, being designed
around 1984 and was the first product offered by Xilinx
The chip contains 64 logic blocks (CLB) and less than 1000 gates.
A person used an MSDOS program "XACT" to program it (the program sold for $12,000).
The chip itself was larger than microprocessors being offered at the time.
It was difficult to make and cost hundreds of dollars.
Moore's law
This is sometimes mis-cited as a claim that processor speed will increase in some way.
That is not it at all.
It was an observation made in 1965 that the number of transistors in a dense
integrated circuit doubles about every two years.
It is not so much a "law" as an observation and a speculation about the future.
People split hairs over whether it is still valid.
Strictly speaking it is not. If you generalize it to a claim that transistor
count increases in some kind of geometric fashion, it is still valid, but
not at the pace observed back in 1965.
Gordon Moore by the way was cofounder of Fairchild and Intel and was for a time
the CEO of Intel.
Feedback? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org