fpga reprogrammable?

Billions of times. Since the configuration is stored in latches (commonly called SRAMs) there is no known wear-out mechanism. You might wear out the Flash storage device after tens of thousands of changes, but nevevr the FPGA itself. Peter Alfke, Xilinx

What never?

No, never!

What never?

Well, hardly ever...

;)

Marketing hype, as usual :)

If it takes 2 seconds to re-configure the FPGA and you do it 24 hours a day 365 days a year, in 100 years you will only reconfigure it

-Alex.

Alex, Xilinx is a U.S. company, and your number is called 1.5 billion over here. (Yes, I know Europeans call it a milliard.) You also picked a very long config time. Typical FPGAs can be configured much faster. But it seems that you just want to create some controversy. I am not so sure that you succeeded. Better luck next time! Peter

Peter, I was trying to create a smile, not a controversy. That should have been clear from the smiley if nothing else.

-Alex.

Alex, sorry for over-reacting. I am perhaps overly sensitive to accusations of "marketing hype", since I am very close to Marketing, but try to curb their excesses. I should have interpreted the smiley the way you intended it. Cheers Peter

Engineering vs Marketing, the clash of civilisations...

When I read the brochure about the software we created, I needed a stiff drink afterwards. Then the phone rings, no, our software doesn't run on Macs. Really ? Cuz we sold 300 Mac licenses already you know. Eeeeehhh ?

Mac Contractor was very happy. An emergency mission to catch the shit before it hits the fan is generally well paid.

How not to love work in a company where the big boss has green carpet and a minigolf in his office ?

It was fun until the CEO ran away with the cash and the black mercedeses.

Ah, startups... Stirs up memories.

(snip)

Usually you want some of the time to actually use the device, not spend all the time as reconfiguration.

I suppose I could imagine a system that rapidly switches between two or three configurations, though. Still, the time between reconfiguration should be longer than reconfiguration time.

-- glen