CHAPTER 3

INTRODUCTION TO FPGA ARCHITECTURE

This chapter is intended to provide an introduction to field-programmable gate array (FPGA) architecture from the systems engineer's rather than the very-large-scale integration (VLSI) designer's point of view. After reading this chapter you should have an understanding of the main FPGA families and be able to make an informed choice of a suitable FPGA for a particular application. The following topics are covered:

• Background to the FPGA concept
• The main classes of FPGA devices
• Important components of FPGA architectures
• Programming technologies
• Techniques for benchmarking FPGA architectures
• A brief history and bibliography of the development of FPGAs