A reprogrammable gate array and applications

A field programmable gate array (FPGA) can implement thousands of gates of logic, has no up-front fixed costs, and can be programmed in a few minutes by users at their site. This paper describes an FPGA that is programmed by writing into on-chip static memory. This kind of FPGA can be reprogrammed any number of times, providing a versatile platform for rapid hardware implementation. Reprogrammable technology allows software-like design methodologies to be applied to logic design. This paper describes the construction of this kind of FPGA, design tradeoffs and examples of applications that take advantage of reprogrammability.