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Since their advent, microprocessors were for many years the only efficient way to provide electronic systems with programmable (user-defined) func- tionality. As discussed in Chapter 1, although their hardware structure is fixed, they are capable of executing different sequences of basic operations ( instructions). The programming process mainly consists of choosing the right instructions and sequences for the target application.
Another way of achieving user-defined functionality is to use devices whose internal hardware resources and interconnects are not totally configured by default. In this case, the process to define functionality ( configuration, as also introduced in Chapter 1) consists of choosing, configuring, and inter- connecting the resources to be used. This second approach gave rise to the FPGA concept (depicted in Figure 2.1), based on the idea of using arrays of custom logic blocks surrounded by a perimeter of I/O blocks (IOBs), all of which could be assembled arbitrarily (Xilinx 2004).
From the brief presentation made in Section 1.4, this chapter describes the main characteristics, structure, and hardware resources of modern FPGAs. It is worth noting that it is not intended to provide a comprehensive list of resources, for which readers can refer to specialized literature (Rodriguez- Andina et al. 2007, 2015) or vendor-provided information. Embedded soft and hard processors are separately analyzed in Chapter 3 because of their special significance and the design paradigm shift they caused (as they transformed FPGAs from hardware accelerators to FPSoC platforms, con- tributing to an ever-growing applicability of FPGAs in many domains). DSP and analog blocks are other important hardware resources that are sepa- rately analyzed in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively, because of their usefulness in many industrial electronics applications.
FIGURE 2.1 FPGA concept.
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