A new face for FPGA design

Abstract

The second major change is coming in the way people design with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). When they first appeared, most engineers used schematic diagrams to describe what the FPGA circuits should do. That then changed to hardware description languages (HDLs) such as Verilog and VHDL. These look more like software programs, although the code is generally structured very differently from algorithms described using software languages such as C. Now, C is emerging as a language that will take algorithms straight to hardware without involving either HDLs or schematics.