The FPGA Turns 40!

Summary

This year marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most exciting and interesting aspects of electronic engineering: the FPGA. The first commercially viable FPGA introduced in 1985 was the Xilinx XC2064, which provided developers with 64 configurable logic blocks, each with a three-input look-up tables.From tiny acorns mighty OAK trees grow. Forty years later, the largest AMD (the successor to Xilinx) FPGA contains 8.9 million system logic cells, providing 8.2 million flip flops and 4 million look up tables, quite an increase on the original 64 LUTs.It is not just the increase in CLBs and registers that distinguish modern FPGAs from their predecessors. Modern devices contain entire processing systems with a range of Arm® processing cores, multi giga bit transceivers, block memory, digital signal processing elements, memory controllers, AI acceleration capabilities and I/O cells which are exceptionally flexible and support a range of standards across single and differential interfaces.Let’s take a look back at some of the very early days of FPGAs.The XC2064 sold for $55, which is roughly equivalent to $165 in 2025. By the end of its commercial life 15 years later, it was available for $5 (or about $15 in today’s prices). The PCN announcing the XC2000 family discontinuation was announced in December 1996, with final deliveries in June 1999.The introduction of the first FPGA led to a seismic shift in how electronic designers could create digital logic solutions. Pretty quickly, designs that had required a complete circuit board could be implemented within the XC2064 and its larger brother, the XC2018 (which offered 100 CLBs). Within two years of the XC2000 family being introduced, the XC3000 (1987) was in production, which ranged from 64 CLBs to 484 CLBs in the largest. By 1989, the first million FPGA devices had been sold. Xilinx would go for an IPO a year later in 1990, and swiftly introduce it third FPGA family, the XC4000 in 1991. The XC4000XL from this family becam...