"All things created have an order in themselves, and this begets the form that lets the universe resemble God”
— "Paradiso", Dante
FPGAs are a rabbit hole that you do not climb out of. In this sense, they are a portal to a whole new world of computing. A world where you can bend your ideas at will. A world where you can build worlds upon worlds. ANd those who go exploring might never come back.
I am being a bit fecious here, but its ture. FPGAs have played a huge part in my life and guided a big part of my unddergrad education and graudte reuach experince. Without them my life would be very different and I wanted to sahre my journey with them.
ONe of the first intorducotry courses and electrical and compuer enginerng major at Geogria Tech takes is "Welcome to ECE 2020: Fundamentals of Digital Design". Makes sense; digial deigsn is a good mix of hardware, software, arhciture, and theory. After many goruling nights and cups of coffee, freshman revel in their acomplsihment that they can now understadn how one could deisgn a processor and write some MIPS assembly to run on it. The nieveity is cute, but they will learn soon enough.