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There are two ways to look at the overall impact of FPGAs (large scale programmable logic technology) on the electronics industry. The first is to consider them as a cool new way of implementing digital logic. This is the conventional model which sees FPGAs as a better, cheaper, faster and field-configurable way of implementing digital electronics, and is part of the ongoing trend from discrete low-level chips, through PALs and onto today's massive FPGAs. This view is simple and comfortable – doing the same thing in a more efficient way. It is not really disruptive, it just gives us access to more power at lower cost. This approach is all about extracting the nth degree of optimization from FPGAs. If, however, we look at the position of FPGAs at the bigger picture level, what we see is a technology that is part of a much larger trend in the development of electronic products – the move from 'hard' to 'soft' design. This is a more 'scary' view of the world because it threatens the way we view the whole process of designing electronics. It is disruptive because it forces us to reconsider why we do things a certain way.
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