In 1980, I became a hardware engineer at Boeing Aerospace, the military side of Boeing. We were using simple TTL circuits and wire wrap boards. The easiest way program these circuits was to remove wire wrapped wires and re-wire the whole board. This was considered state of the art. Then I read in EE Times that Cypress made what they called a CPLD with included EDA ABEL. I called them, and they were glad to send me samples plus ABEL. The products worked, and I started the CPLD craze at BAC. Then I moved on to a defense contractor in Orlando, FL. I introduced the CPLD there in 1984. I couldn't believe I was doing this as they had hundreds of hardware engineers. Over the years, FPGAs came along and matured. They were hard to use, but EDA was the issue. They didn't trust it and continued using schematic entry. I was called to work on a brand new project, and we had meetings about how we were going to design. I was in favor of using VHDL, and a very influential engineer wanted schematic entry At at meeting, our management wanted to know why each one of us was so different in the design approach. We were invited to come up there and rationalize our design entry method. The other engineer made some slides and showed that schematic entry was the way to go, mainly because everyone knew how to use the tool. In his conclusion, he said "A picture is worth a thousand words." Then it was my turn. I went up and explained the internal workings of an FPGA and how complicated they were as a function of density. I then showed how VHDL worked, especially using IF THEN ELSE and Case statements. My final conclusion ended in "A word is worth a thousand pictures. Which one is easier to implement?" Of course we went with VHDL, and it became the standard design entry for decades. As these products matured, another EDA came along named Verilog. It was actually long used by the ASIC community, of which we knew nothing about. If you wanted to use Verilog, you had to quit and go with a commercial company. I was a contractor at this defense company and started roaming around other companies, spreading FPGA usage. Xilinx was always trying to get me to switch from Altera to them. One day a Xilinx FAE wanted to talk to me and asked me what I would like in an FPGA that wasn't there yet. I told him that I had to implement my own FIFOs to cross clock boundaries. He immediately saw the benefit of this and went back to the factory. Lo and behold the next line 4000 had built-in FIFOs! Since asynchronous clocks were a big problem, this family made it big everywhere. From that innovation, Xilinx made me an XPERTS partner, and I flourished big time. End of story. Sorry it was so long.

You know that FPGAs are magic when they seem even more mystifying and baffling the more you learn about them

Another use of FPGAs that wasn't mentioned is that they can stand in for parts that have become unobtainium, like VIC-II chips. This means greatly enhanced capabilities for keeping existing systems in place far longer than the normal manufacturing support processes would otherwise allow.

Back in the eighties, FPGA design tools were difficult and unpredictable. But thankfully with three decades of advancements, FPGA design tools are now difficult and unpredictable.

FPGAs are what roped me into computer engineering. At my university, we're expected to write a processor architecture from scratch (usually MIPS-based, but I went against the grain and did stack-based), write a "C subset" compiler for your architecture, a very simple operating system, and lastly some networking capabilities. It's crazy that microprocessor programming and FPGA development kits can be had at accessible prices at all.

Your videos are FPGAs - factual, precise with great analogies.

Another cool thing about FPGAs is their interconnects. Decades ago, we didn't worry too much about how a signal got from A to B, because wire wrapped and FPGAs implemented them for us. Then came along higher speed circuitry. Electromagnetic fields coupled signals in one wire to another wire, especially if those wires ran parallel to each other. We didn't worry about what was inside the FPGAs, because they seemed not to have this cross coupling problem. Finally we decided to characterize this phenomenon to wire interconnects on the boards. We came up with something the RF engineers used - micro strips and strip lines. Most of you will recognize them, because boards are constructed of layers. These layers are GND, then interconnects, then PWR, then interconnects, and so forth. This solved the glitch problem. CPLD and FPGA manufacturers figured this out much earlier, probably because they came from the ASIC world.

In the 70's we built a lot of amazing stuff with PAL's they removed a lot of TTL chips from our circuits. We even used a PAL programmed to replace a part that a vendor would no longer sell to us due to trying to put us out of business.

"With great flexibility comes great misakeability." I love it! 🙂

I posted below, but I just want to talk more about how FPGAs evolved in the last 5 years - from a user perspective. I became a consultant after 5 years working for BAC. It was a hit or miss thing, and I could have been making a huge career mistake. But I didn't. I've talked below about how I started with the 22V10, CPLDs, then FPGAs maturing. In the past 10 years or so, FPGAs started incorporating software and hardware microprocessors. At first, the designs were done by hardware and software guys working together. I also had a software background, which is why I loved EDA and simulation. But a problem came up, because companies now wanted me to design the hardware AND software. I was well versed in C, C++ and I told them I could do it but would need more time. They wanted me to do it concurrently with the existing schedule. I told them I wasn't their guy. I retired five years ago, and I don't know what the design environment is today. Perhaps some of you would like to comment about what I say above. Here's a cool story. l was referred to a small company that made very precise oscillators. They needed someone to design a CPLD that controlled its frequencies. It was an easy design until I got there. I met with the Engineering Manager along with a young guy 6 months out of college. I told them how I would design it, and the engineering manager told me I had to use C Sharp (C#), because the kid had standardized everything to C#. Of course I thought this was ridiculous as I would be using Vivado to do a very simple design. I told them I couldn't do it in C#, because Vivado didn't accept C# inputs. He asked me what it would take to make it happen, and I said about $1M for Xilinx to design the tool. He decided to go ahead with my method but wanted me to teach the kid how to use the tool. I said "Okay, but he has to be watching what I do so I can explain it to him." Long story short, he never observed me do the design. When I was finished, everything worked great, and the EM asked me if the kid had learned what I did. I said "I can't teach someone if that someone isn't around to be my student." He got mad at me for not getting him, and I told him I wasn't the kid's manager. I got paid, the design was easy and worked very well. Six months later, he called me up and told me they had lost the design files. He wanted to know if I had them. I told him that if I did, I would be violating the NDA we both signed. I got paid a pretty shiny nickel to go back there and redesign it with my arms handcuffed behind my back. There is a moral to this story that I'm sure I don't have to explain.

Great video and very well researched, as always! Note that the name "Field Programmable Gate Array" was meant to invoke familiarity with "Gate Array" (called that in the US, known as ULA, Uncommitted Logic Array, in the UK) which was a chip that had the same logic for all clients except for the metal layer, which was different for each one. Most Gate Arrays used simple NAND gates as their basic element and there was one FPGA that tried that, but it was really smart to have a larger basic block such as a four input lookup table. And with fixed wiring the FPGAs had to add as many transistors to route signals as in the basic blocks.

FPGA are cool and especially for real-time inference with minimal latency. Azure provides FPGA accelerator for certain types of models. Even though I've studied FPGA, I didn't know about the history. A video about Verilog would be cool.

It always blows my mind how one tiny chip can become anything i want it to be. One moment its a microblaze system, another moment its a dedicated neural network with specialised matrix multipliers. Like damn, thats plain magic

I work with FPGAs daily. They’re super super fun. I feel like the depth they’re capable of allows for some incredible creativity. You really really have to grind with them but it’s worth it

I designed PLDs, CPLDs and FPGAs in the 1980s. Great to see a history of this exciting and challenging sector. Good work and again great research! Keep up the good work...

I am a FPGA lover and developer and I love to see other people getting introduced to these amazing and capable devices. Thanks

FPGAs always have fascinated me. So counter intuitive to print, plug, and play standardization of tech industry. Thanks for the video!

I'm an associate FPGA engineer but never got into the history of it. This was a very eye opening video! I just discovered your channel. Great videos.

I used the 22V10 PAL quite a lot. It was a big upgrade from a breadboard full of TTL.

9:24 Bill Carter, the designer of the first FPGA (and later a CTO of Xilinx) have said that at first he thought that FPGAs were _"the stupidest thing ever"_-- because they were very large chips, and therefore slow and expensive. Who would choose the slower and the more expensive solution over other alternatives? Although now we know how useful they are, back then the FPGAs were not an obvious winner as a product. Rather subtle factors, like being able to use cutting edge fabrication process before it was available to anybody else (15:46) really helped here. It took some genius to bet on this when starting the company in 1980s.

I use FPGAs for years but I didn't know the complete history, especially that part about PALs. Very well done.

Great video on one of my favorite subjects. I'd like to add a couple things. First of all (as the poster below said), this history skips a very important branch of IC history, the gate array, which FPGAs (which are a namesake, the Field Programmable Gate Array). Basically gate arrays were ICs that consisted of a matrix of transistors (often termed gates) without the interconnect layers. Since transistors then, and largely even today, are patterned into the silicon wafer itself, this divided the wafer processing into two separate divisions, the wafer patterning, and the deposition of aluminum (interconnect). In short, a customer could save quite a bit of money by just paying for the extra masks needed to deposit interconnects, and take stock wafers to make an intermediate type of chip between full custom and discrete electronics. It was far less expensive than full custom, but of course that was like saying that Kathmandu is not as high as Everest. Xilinx used to have ads showing a huge bundle of bills with the caption "does this remind you of gate array design? Perhaps if the bills were on fire". Altera came along and disrupted the PLA/PAL market and knocked over the king o' them all the 22V10, which could be said to be the 7400 of the PAL market. They owned the medium scale programmable market for a few years until Xilinx came along. Eventually Altera fought back, but by then it was too late. However, Altera got the last word. The EDA software for both Xilinx and Altera began to resemble those "bills o' fire" from the original Xilinx ads, and Altera completely reversed its previous stance to small developers (which could be described as "if you ain't big, go hump a pig") and started giving away their EDA software. Xilinx had no choice but to follow suit, and the market opened up with a bang. There have been many alternate technologies to the RAM cell tech used by Xilinx, each with an idea towards permanently or semipermanently programming the CLB cells so that an external loading prom was not required. Some are still around, but what was being replaced by all that work and new tech was serial EEPROM that was about 8 pins and approximately the cost of ant spit, so they never really knocked Xilinx off its tuffet. My favorite story about that was one maker here in the valley who was pushing "laser reprogrammability", where openings in the passivation of a sea of gates chip allowed a laser to burn interlinks and thus program the chip. It was liternally PGA, dropping the F for field. It came with lots of fanfare, and left with virtual silence. I later met a guy who worked there and asked him "what happened to the laser programmable IC tech?". He answered in one word: contamination. Vaporising aluminum and throwing the result outwards is not healthy for a chip. After the first couple of revs of FPGA technology, the things started to get big enough that you could "float" (my term) major cells onto them, culminating with an actual (gasp) CPU. This changed everything. Now you could put most or all of the required circuitry on a single FPGA and the CPU to run the thing as well. This meant that software hackers (like myself) could get into the FPGA game. The only difference now is that even a fairly large scale 32 bit processor can be tucked into the corner of one. In the olden days, when you wanted to simulate hardware for an upcoming ASIC, you employed a server farm running 24/7 hardware simulations, or even a special hardware simulation accellerator. Then somebody figured out that you could lash a "sea of FPGAs" together and load a big 'ole giant netlist into it and get the equivalent of a hardware simulation, but near the final speed of the ASIC. DINI and friends were born, large FPGA array boards that cost a couple of automobiles to buy. At this point Xilinx got wise to the game, I am sure. They were selling HUGE $1000 per chip FPGAs that could not have a real end consumer use.

Your video essays are consistently some of the highest quality videos on youtube right now and having a new one show up always brightens my day. Thank you!

Takes me back to my engineering studies in 99s, programming the FPGAs in VHDL and seeing the Xilinx come in to allow so much more functionality in a sexier looking packages than the dips

I love all your videos -- thanks for the excellent research and presentation which goes into all of them.

Thank you for the trip down memory lane!! 😃 I remember working on designs with the XC2000 and later, the XC3000 family. I used XACT for design and timing closure was sometimes a real challange with several iterations of the place & route overnight and finally manual tweaks at interconnect level to shave off the final ns or so. That low level access and control over the hardware really appealed to me. Some larger logic blocks, e.g. for state machines, were created with PALASM 4 (a language very few people would remember now) which could be imported into XACT through an intermediate format but the main FPGA circuit was schematic based and you could pull 74' series logic gates and other functions from a library. The catch was that some of these functions had subtle differences, compared to the 74 series, catching out the unaware. I could go on and on, with my memories! Since AMD used to make PALs, AMD acquiring XILINX meant that things came full circle. in a way.

Love working with FPGA, I like how you have total control on clock cycle level, like in cpu there is so much layer.

to show you the power of flex tape I REPROGRAMMED THIS CHIP IN HALF

I did not expect such an in depth electronics history dive from this channel! I'm not sure where CPLDs would fit in but I was always taught that CPLDs were FPGAs little brothers. FPGAs are exceptionally strong when multiple very fast serial streams need to be modified on the fly. FPGAs are more similar to GPUs in their pipelined operations than a microprocessor even though you can have "Soft cores" programmed into the "logic slush".

In the late 80s to early 90s, I used a lot of 16V8 and 22V10 PLDs. By the mid-90s, I was using AMDs MACH line of CPLDs, which they sold off to Lattice. Ironic, that they bought Xilinx, years later. Also by the mid-90s, FPGA complexity was large enough so that you could program an 8-bit processor, like the Z80 into one. Vintage 70s 8-bitters live on, as macros, in FPGAs. That the circuit is stored in RAM, can be a plus. It lets you reconfigure your "circuit", on the fly.

This video was released on the same day I managed to take one "Altera Max EPM7128SLC84-15" to a microscope section at my school´s biology laboratory. I decapped the die using an SMD Rework Station (fancy name for big hair dryer). I will exhibit this and other ICs with the same microscopes in a Technical Fair at my school. Great and accidentally convenient video, as always!

I was just looking up a video on Verilog, when I looked down and saw that you uploaded. I was not expecting you to have uploaded a video on FPGA. Love you videos

Given the opacity of this market, I think that you did a phenomenal job with this video. Extremely high effort - thank you! I learned a lot. I'm a true "FPGA hobbyist" in a sense that I make fairly complex designs in my spare time, at 3 - 5k lines of VHDL code per design, to do all sorts of things. But, I don't do it to "proper standards" with obsessive verification and analysis. That's too much of a pain if I'm not paid for it. I work with entry-level chips, so even with 99% chip utilization, synthesis times are only about a minute.. and my approach is always just to synthesize the dang thing and examine the outputs on a logic analyzer in another window. Can't beat looking at physical outputs, and modern logic analyzer UI is faaar better than timing analyzers within FPGA tools. I think that a giant barrier for FPGA usage in hobby settings, is that there is no clear picture of how you'd use an FPGA for a "quick and dirty" design, while avoiding common glitches and pitfalls. However, people who are formally trained for HDL set a bar that's too high for most hobbyists, so those hobbyists just go to microcontrollers instead.. since "quick and dirty" is the name of the game with those. Yet, FPGAs are far superior to microcontrollers for many hobbyist applications. You can't beat having so many I/Os, of being able to nail deterministic timing, scalability (I've "overclocked" so many displays and other chips by feeding them flawlessly-timed signals etc), and even creating new functionality for various chips and devices by simply using the raw speed of FPGAs. Once you get comfortable with FPGAs, you start to find microcontrollers unbearably limited. My algorithms often start conceptually in mspaint (haha) and then I have a lot of fun implementing them on FPGAs. Being in the hobbyist space means that you don't need to obsess over resource utilization (as much). Real designs are going to be some mixture of sequential and combinatorial logic, but when possible, I stick to keeping things combinatorial. You have the spare resources so why not. Why wait 50 clock cycles for a result when you can do it in 0. ;) A lot of algorithms you read about "in the wild" are meant for CPUs, and as such, they're sequential. So, you often end up in uncharted (or at least poorly documented) waters. To make a big but obvious point, I think that current FPGA software environments are complete dinosaurs, and they directly prevent adoption by non-professional users. It's very unfortunate. That said, the software side of FPGA synthesis is absurdly complex. The chips are nothing compared to the complexity of that software. I think that.. for a given market to re-invent itself, you have to find a way to make it accessible. So far, the FPGA industry as a whole has failed at that, and the average electronics enthusiast considers FPGAs too complex or out of reach for their designs. I'll make some videos about it on an electronics channel I have soon enough. Should be fun.

Thank you for the interesting video on an important topic rarely considered outside the world of electronic engineers. I worked at AMD and then Cypress Semiconductor in the late 1980s as a product engineer for programable logic devices. Then, and now, the use to make circuit emulators to prove out designs was but one (relatively small) market segment. Their first market was replacing TTL devices which were then being used to make .... everything! Data General famously created the first 16-bit minicomputer and beat DEC to market by using PALs as a primary logic device element (MMI's early yield problems put that project as risk!). Today the programmable radios used to allow updating cellphones after manufacture are an implementation of programable logic. Many low to mid-volume applications do not justify the creation of full-custom chips and need something catalog products don't offer. This was and remains the key application for programmable logic devices, be they relatively simple PALs or complex devices like Xilinx and Atmel innovated. Amazingly enough, the brand new when I worked on it in 1984 22V10 macrocell PAL is still being manufactured and sold for glue logic and other general/mult-purpose uses. I just checked, and Digikey has them in stock for $2.51 each :). You cover an astonishing array of diverse topics, and I'm amazed how much you get exactly right!

I remember Altera in a Semiconductor assembly company. Initially we have difficulty assembling it in Die Attach and Wirebonds tools: Their choice of leadframes gives us initial headaches as we needed to re configure our tools mechanically!

Yet another excellent video. Brought back so many memories for me watching this technology develop. Also reminded me of the team of colleagues I knew that programed these devices.

Excellent video! Well researched, organized and very understandable. I don’t work in the field, but I couldn’t turn it off. Kudos!

I love FPGAs. I do a lot of dev for science instrument companies that need special front end hardware connected to microcontrollers or full microprocessors to collect the processed data from the instrument. The latest SoCs are just amazing in scope and breadth of what they'll do. Know a single modern FPGA inside and out (and it's dev environment) is literally a full-time job in itself. But they are a lot of fun to make things with.

Seriously: THANK YOU ! I really like your channel, but this video sent me back to the early 90s when I programmed my first GAL units while my teachers were teaching us TTL/CMOS... they were already late!

Great video! It feels like microcontroller video is somewhere in the making. One of my professors in his lecture course was explaining to us the architecture of PSoC. He explained to us their ingenious invetion by Cypress semicondutor when they used CMOS in order to make any analog componet via switching transistors with different frequencies using their capacitive resistance. I still remember writing complex resistance equation on the blackboard, but I was a bit sceptical at the time (that it was solely their invention) since he might've been simply connected with that company. He might've known that for sure (he used to fly to San Jose every year to visit some related conferences), but I still couldn't find it on the internet (I didn't try that hard to be fair) whether it's just marketing or PSoCs are actually completely different things from other microcontrollers. That's funny when you remember learning PLAs and PALs when FPGAs were already around for a long time. All these conjunctive normal forms, disjunctive normal forms, and converting it in the end into Zhegalkin polynomial... We had this specific type of torture in having to write all this down by hand which was like 50 A4 pages with all the schematics (also had to be drawn by hand carefully) including all the junctions between AND and OR arrays.

Dr David Johanssen from Cal Tech created the first programming environment for FPGAs as his PhD project. I’ve known David for decades and it’s interesting journey he went on in the industry.

A new Asianometry video after work? Fricking heck yeah. Keep it poggin', my man.

Please note, that you need either (not and or) or (not and and) gates to implement any combinational function. In the picture at 4:41 you can see the not-gates close to the top on the left hand side (the triangles with the circle). Using both and and or makes the chip more versatile and the implementation more compact.

John, I am extremely thankful for this video.

Such great videos on such technical subject matter, great job

Amazing video with excellent detail. Thank you very much!

The People’s Liberation Army bit got me real good 😂

Started working on FPGAs with XC3000 series and now VU57P on my desk. Both shown at the end of the video. What a great trip.

Thk you ever so much; I think I finally have these down good enough to start projects. But it was hard as hell & pretty-damn lonely to figure them out almost on my own. PS: Thks for the big-picture. It helps me put the details together. For small/simple/parallel processing, FPGAs can't be beat.

I really appreciate the work you are doing, it gives viewers a valuable historical analysis of technology that explains how we got to where we are today, and it also provides insight into future possibilities yet to be realized. Thank you!

Another excellent ep, thank you!

Good one! Have been wanting you to cover Xilinx for a while :)

It would be great if you did more FPGA videos. Some really cool chips coming out.

Fascinating history lesson here. I saw the whole thing from the late 70's on.

Hey man your videos are getting better in terms of quality.

I love history about how various IC's came to be.

the OLMC (output logic macrocell) usually has configuration bits for it, one for an "inverted" output, "XoR" (per olmc on most models), weather or not to use the flip flop, ("SYN" bit, usually global) and weather or not it is to be used as an input, the GAL16V8 is a really nice chip if all you need is a handful of logic gates for glue logic or more advanced things like full 7 segment display decoders

Great video. Really interesting story about the rise of these incredible devices.

As and FPGA engineer thank you making this video. Going to send this to anyone when they ask me what I do.

Excellent review ! Thank You.

FPGAs are still mind blowing to me - back in 2001, my final year uni project was overseen by a supervisor who casually asked me to conduct a feasibility study where an Atmel FPGA would be used for a specific application which incorporated USB into the FPGA - I bought a book on VHDL and didn't get any further since USB was still pretty new, not to mention trying to get my head around something completely new like VHDL - a few years later I had a lodger who worked for Imagination Technologies and could knock up mobile graphics chip designs using VHDL over breakfast 🤣

Fantastic video as always!

I think my favorite part of Asianometry videos are at the end when the speaker says "All right everyone, that's it, shows over, get out, I'm done, time to leave, like & subscribe, now beat it, scram"

Thanks for the great video? Maybe a good idea to have a video on the eASICs as well.

Asianometry, you’re a bit of a legend mate. Cheers.

Despite them being a really cool idea, in 30+ years I have only ever used programmable logic twice. The first was in the 1990s where I had to replace an obsolete stopwatch IC (maybe a 7225?) with a plugin board. I was just a baby engineer in a company where only seniors got to program microprocessors. Then in the 2010s I concocted some far fetched SPI bus master driving an ADC at full pelt with a micro as SPI slave with DMA storage. It was the only way to get the performance the system required. And it needed EVERY BIT of small print in the ADC datasheet. Really, a different micro would have been better but the development kit for the CPLD was cheaper than a new compiler for the micro. So I did it the hard way.

There's an open source project called MiSTer that uses a FPGA to recreate various classic computers, game consoles and arcade machines.

interested information man thanks for your time and sharing

I worked for Scantron (eg - test scoring machines) when their logic boards, which consisted entirely of discrete gates, evolved into microprocessor machines. I haven’t worked for them in a while but I can see how their boards can evolve back (if they haven’t already) into gates (FPGAs).

Would have liked to hear of the applications at the beginning of the vid. Great vid. New subscriber.

Keep up the good content 👍

Excellent intro to FPGA. Well done!

Incredible research .

Thank you friend and teacher

Yeees glad to finally see this idea come to life :)

Great video! Congratulations

Nice overview!

Excellent! Thank you

This guy is such a good storyteller

I remember the TTL: Transistor-Transistor Logic. We used it in our Logic Circuits Lab subject during college days. We use 7000s IC for our truth logic projects in a breadboard.

Great Show!

So stoked!!!!

As a computer science guy I am fascinated by FPGA. I am interested to learn and try one out. Having a processor specialized to your need is just cool.

Next video on Programmable Analog Arrays and PSoCs, please. Thanks for sharing cheers

I learned so many things I didn't even know I wanted to know in this video.

FPGAs are also at the center of the top performing emulation setups for old video games and computers. For those who are looking for the most accurate representation of actual hardware. There are projects on going right now to make an fpga version of the venerable 6502 that runs at 100 MHz, which is at least 25 times faster than previous commercially available 6502s. And along those same lines, another project on going is the creation of a Motorola 68030 running at 1 GHz.

Great history of the FPGA. I use them all the time and love configuring them. They are gems.

I didn't know any of this history, thanks!

One thing you didn't mention that FPGA are use where programs will change in time, so you optimize hardware to run this algorithms faster, as in many transmission device, which are deployed and not change for years as hardware, but software is moving on.

When studying electronics for a design and build project, our class was warned that using any PAL or ram based implementation would result in a fail. A full set of 7400 series set chips resulted, and a lot of understanding too.

This video is the best homage to the humble FPGA I've seen thus far

Awesome video , Thanks

Woo, very important subject rarely mentioned by YT channels, since most of them considered it sort of sorcery.

I just programmed my first fpga 2 days ago. Very cool to think about

Great Video! Slight correction: Not every combinatorial function can be implemented using AND and OR gates, but with NOT, AND, OR it can (completeness)! Which is why most had all three and not only the two.

I am an RFIC designer and love your channel. Are you planning to make any videos on analog/high frequency design aspect of integrated circuits? GaN would be an interesting subject as well as beamformers for phased array antennas.

The US military pretty much made them stick and still is a major driver in the products that Altera and Xilinx offer. FPGAs are perfect for .mil signal processing like radar, sonar, avionics, etc. They were also huge on Actel back in the day. Fun stuff.

I've got a nice Altera EPM5192 EPLD, from the tail end of the xPLD lines - probably? about the biggest windowed chip around at 9x10mm, and the patterns look beautiful and are still an old/big enough process to take nice high res macro photos of, got some pretty good results

Definitely gonna watch this soon. Edit: Watched it. Awesome vid. We have been using xilinx FPGA's in school

You make great videos.