Field Programmable Gate Array

The FPGA market has mostly settled into a state where there are two major general purpose FPGA manufacturers and a number of other players who differentiate themselves by offering unique capabilities. To simplify the design of complex systems in FPGAs, there exist libraries of predefined complex functions and circuits that have been tested and optimized to speed up the design process. A notable difference between CPLDs and FPGAs is the presence in most FPGAs of higher level embedded functions (such as adders and multipliers) and embedded memories. FPGAs are generally slower than their application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) counterparts, can't handle as complex a design, and draw more power. A field programmable gate array (FPGA) is a semiconductor device containing programmable logic components and programmable interconnects.