[Fsf-friends] FPGAs and free software

[George Scaria]

Dear all,
       There is a lot of activity in the electronics
community over the so-called FPGAs(Field Programmable Gate
Array). It is a custom programmable digital IC with lots of
capabilities and pins. FPGAs are very exotic devices, and
even microprocessors to the speeds of ghz can be made from
them. We do the design of the custom chip in a language
called VHDL, which is like Ada, or Verilog HDL, which is like
C. Sometimes, some elements are used very commonly, and are
called cores. Some FPGA cores are developed by people with
free software inclinations and are available under GPL. That
is a very nice thing, free software gets into hardware too!!

-George Scaria

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