How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

Re:How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013) by sago on Sunday March 13, 2016 @07:20AM (#11277260)

I agree with this. I've always wanted to use an FPGA for something cool, but never found a need. (I'm a hobbyist, fwiw).

They fall in a middle ground between things I can build more simply with a super cheap microcontroller (I buy Arduino nanos for $2, for example), and things I really need GPU compute for. So I'm stuck. I keep thinking I'll do a DSP project soon, but that's more because it is one of the few things I think an FPGA will be useful for, than because I need it.

So cool, yes. Practical, maybe - but not very, at least for me.

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Re:How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013) by agumonkey on Sunday March 13, 2016 @10:59AM (#11277890)

Bunnie Huang (Novena laptop) talks mention how they reverse engineered ISA by MitM the CPU through the FPGA on the Novena's board. That's as cool as epic.

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Re:How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013) by nickpsecurity on Sunday March 13, 2016 @01:24PM (#11278462)

That is pretty epic

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Re:How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013) by iheartmemcache on Sunday March 13, 2016 @05:42PM (#11279476)

He did it in a hotel room in a foreign country. He, Tarnovsky, Nohl and Goodspeed just blow my mind.

Things like the ZINC by Xilinx are working its way into things like the Red Pitaya[1] which is absolutely remarkably capable for the price range, but yeah FPGA's are pretty niche for the common end-user. Lithography on sil wafers ends up being cheaper at nearly any scale. It turns out more economical just to do that one of those cheap FPGA-to-ASIC conversion dealies (rather than using Cadence or whatever VLSI tooling you have to DFM from the start [I think UC Berkeley has a full architecture/RTL/logic/circuit/physical kit]) at the threshold of around a few thousand units.

[1] http://store.redpitaya.com/red-pitaya-board-36.html

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