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 loo...