Chapter 1. Device Architecture

Mark L. ChangElectrical and Computer EngineeringFranklin W. Olin College of Engineering

The best race car drivers understand how their cars work. The best architects know how carpenters, bricklayers, and electricians do their jobs. And the best programmers know how the hardware they are programming does computation. Knowing how your device works, “down to the metal,” is essential for efficient utilization of available resources.

In this chapter, we take a look inside the package to discover the basic hardware elements that make up a typical field-programmable gate array (FPGA). We’ll talk about how computation happens in an FPGA—from the blocks that do the computation to the interconnect that shuttles data from one ...

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