How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one
This is a solid article. I'm continually surprised by how few software engineers in industry spend the time to pick up HDL and FPGA programming in general. In my mind, it is an easy way to expand your breadth of knowledge and make you a touch more valuable to future employers. They say that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail and I'm certainly inflicted with that same disease as I see the utility of FPGAs everywhere I look. Prices have plummeted while densities have skyrocketed. A simple $25 part gets you quite a bit of fabric and some $90 eval hardware will give you a sweet little platform. [1]<p>With that said, since I began working with them there have been two "Holy Grails" of FPGA design: (1) Partial Reconfiguration and (2) High Level Synthesis.<p>The first, Partial Reconfiguration, has been more-or-less solved although the tools have a long way to go. One current design I'm working on loads it's PCIe endpoint and DDR3 controller first, establishes communication with the application running on the host PC, then based on user input loads the rest of the FPGA.<p>The second, High Level Synthesis, isn't here yet. The goal is to turn a company's vast army of software engineers into FPGA programmers overnight. A worthy cause. Every foray into this field has failed (although the jury is still out on Xilinx's purchase of autoESL) Honestly, I'm not sure it will ever get there. The point of optimized, custom hardware is to make use of it. Abstracting it all away seems counterproductive, not to mention very hard.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/AES-S6MB-LX9.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/AES-S6MB-LX9....</a>