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@cstanhope @theruran I don’t know what that is but I went to their website and it’s *definitely* for people in the know.

@garrett Lattice Semi's site? If you're curious, I can give a toot sized summary. (But if not, no worries.)

@cstanhope Yeah sure; just give me the elevator pitch. I’m not super technical but I know a bit. Looks like they’re…microcontrollers?

@garrett Lattice makes FPGAs and PLDs, which are programmable logic devices. More like reprogrammable integrated circuits than microcontrollers. In fact, you can implement a microcontroller in an FPGA (although that is not necessarily the best use for them unless you are prototyping something). PLDs are usually simpler devices useful for "glue" logic in a circuit.

@garrett
The advantages of FPGAs are fine grained parallelism and the reprogrammability. So if you can solve your problem with a micro, use that. But if you need custom logic, and ASIC or IC is not within budget, then you should look towards FPGAs for complex problems and PLDs for glue logic. Some products combine micros and FPGAs. So you can get both in one package.

(Sorry, that was more than one toot.)

@cstanhope thank you for taking the time to explain it! Can you give me a couple of common examples? I see some stuff listed for A/V, that’s my realm; what would FPGAs and or PLDs be used for that?

@garrett @cstanhope In broadcast we use FPGAs in fancy devices to do the real time processing of video signals a looooot faster than if it was in software, while being way more flexible than if it was a fixed design ASIC.

@garrett @cstanhope One of the hot products right now is an Arkona at300, which is an FPGA card that do various conversion and processing pipelines on up to ~24 4k flows per card. Doing anywhere near that in software would need a top of the line computer absolutely loaded with the latest GPUs, and would still be slower than on an FPGA.

@monoxane @cstanhope Oh damn that’s awesome. I run the A/V for a couple “hybrid” conferences every year and it’s all patchworked together with cheap stuff lol. Only 4 1080p cameras tops, tho, but 2 laptops running it all.

Your friendly 'net denizen

@garrett @monoxane Those are great examples. Another A/V example is you'll find them embedded in products like the Blackmagic line (not Lattice in those from what I've seen, but Xilinx). They're also commonly found in oscilloscopes.

They're embedded in a lot of things, and you may not even be aware as it's not really a bullet point feature. For a more "in your face" example, the retro gaming crowd uses them to emulate old gaming systems. For example the MiSTer project:

mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_

mister-devel.github.ioMiSTer FPGA DocumentationMiSTer FPGA is an open source project that aims to recreate various classic computers, game consoles, and arcade machines, using modern hardware.