From Mars To Retro Gaming: After 40 Years FPGAs Continue To Blaze A Trail

Forbes

02-06-2025

AMD is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Field Programmable Gate Array, or FPGA, today and the company is detailing some of the major milestones in development of the technology over the years. If you recall, AMD acquired Xilinx back in 2022 and has since maintained the company's leadership position in the space. The post on AMD's site covers the FPGA from the early days and its invention back in 1985, all the way up to today, where AMD FPGAs and adaptive SoCs (a modern evolution of the tech), are used in everything from the NASA's Mars rovers, to bleeding edge networking and communications systems, and autonomous vehicles.
Let's start with a bit of background on what an FPGA actually does. Some might consider the FPGA somewhat of an unsung hero in the semiconductor market and it's important to understand what they've enabled in their 40-year history. An FPGA is a type of integrated circuit that can be continually reprogrammed in the field to perform different types of computing tasks. Unlike traditional chips that have fixed functionality, FPGAs are mostly comprised of an array of programmable logic blocks and interconnects, which allows them to be customized for a myriad of applications. FPGAs are currently used in virtually every major industry, from automotive, aerospace, and industrial automation, to consumer electronics, telecommunications, advanced research and development, and space exploration. FPGAs are well-suited for many emerging fields, where flexibility to tune algorithms and compute requirements are paramount.
The Evolution Of FPGA Technology
AMD
The FPGA was invented by the late engineer, and Xilinx co-founder, Ross Freeman, in a effort to find a better, more cost-effective way to design chips. The first commercial FPGA to come from Xilinx was branded the XC2064. It featured 85,000 transistors, 64 configurable logic blocks and 58 I/O blocks. That's an absolutely miniscule device relative to some of AMD's most advanced modern FPGA-based devices, like the 138 billion transistor Versal Premium VP1902, which packs 18.5 million logic cells, 2,654 I/O blocks, and up to 6,864 DSP58 Engines, along with an array of memory, security and interfacing technologies. Nonetheless, the original XC2064 paved the way for a wide array of innovations and ultimately revolutionized how chips were made.
AMD Versal Premium Board
AMD
In fact, FPGAs had a direct impact on my partner Dave's early career in the semiconductor industry. In a former life, Dave was a semiconductor sales engineer, and his customer Motorola worked with him on a design with Xilinx FPGAs to pioneer and engineer the first consumer broadband internet cable modems on the market. Dave notes that, 'Without FPGAs, engineering development times for an ASIC would have translated to years of simulation and R&D, and much higher risk, versus months due to the programmable, adaptable nature of the technology.' Motorola remains a key player in consumer broadband connectivity to this day.
FPGAs effectively helped pioneer the "fabless" semiconductor model that is pervasive today. Engineers would fine tune and optimize their early designs using FPGAs, and once the design was considered complete and stable it would be used as the foundation for an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). Though, that wouldn't always be the case – for many applications, sticking with an FPGA throughout a product's lifecycle was the ultimate solution. Even now, the leaders in EDA, Synopsys and Cadence, both feature Versal Premium VP1902 adaptive SoCs in their most advanced prototyping, emulation, and virtualization tools; I've written about them on a few occasions. An adaptive SoC, or system on a chip, is an advanced evolution of the FPGA that couples programmable gate arrays with dedicated processor cores, DSPs, IO, and other connectivity. Over the years, the integration of embedded memory and digital signal processors into FPGAs was crucial for early wireless infrastructure, and the designs have continually evolved since then to better address the needs of many industries.
Mega65 PCB With AMD FPGA.
Mega65.Org
As advanced as FPGAs have become, however, they're not just for today's fast-paced, bleeding-edge applications. They've also enabled an entire ecosystem for fans of retro computing, like me. Numerous projects exist today featuring AMD FPGAs, to emulate early computers and gaming systems. The Mega 65, for example, is a modern replica of the never released and ultra rare Commodore 65, though it obviously has far more capability than the original. There are also boards like the Arty-x7 family for do-it-yourselfers and hobbyists that want to experiment with FPGAs for their own designs.
Moving forward, AMD's FPGAs and adaptive SoCs will continue to advance with more gates, increased processing power, and additional IO, and will address a wide array of applications. FPGAs will remain pervasive in everything from ADAS, to robotics, to healthcare imaging, emerging 6G wireless networks and – of course – AI. AMD's adaptive SoCs in particular, with their array of processing resources for diverse sensors and inputs, are ideal for self-contained AI applications at the edge, where data from cameras and various other sensors needs to be processed and acted upon with ultra-low latencies. In their 40-year history, FPGAs have enabled a multitude of innovations, and even today they show no signs of stopping.