In 1985, a radical idea changed the course of hardware design: making chips reprogrammable. That was when Ross Freeman the co-founder of Xilinx introduced the world’s first commercially viable FPGA, the XC2064. Its 85,000 transistors were arranged in 64 loosely organized logic blocks with connections that could be configured and reconfigured with software. That modest beginning was just a hint at what would come because for the first time it made hardware as flexible as software, allowing engineers to redefine a chip’s functionality even after manufacturing. That was the brilliance of it and it still surprises me today.
I like this explanation of why Ross Freeman developed the XC2064: “He wanted to design a computer chip that effectively acted as a blank tape, allowing the user to program the chip rather than having to purchase a preprogrammed chip from the manufacturer.”
The XC2064 and other FPGAs that followed also helped pioneer the ‘fabless’ semiconductor model. They proved you didn’t need your own silicon fab to deliver cutting-edge chips – just smart designers and programmable logic. Engineers could deploy designs directly on the bench, rework and refine them rapidly, and cut months off traditional development timelines. Bugs were not fatal any more. They were just part of the iterative cycle.
What fascinates me the most is where we are still going on this FPGA journey because it hasn’t stopped. The successor to Xilinx, AMD, has shipped over three billion FPGAs and adaptive SoCs and its Versal Premium VP1902 adaptive SoC has 138 billion transistors and over 18.5 million logic cells. Quite some leap from the XC2064.
Design tools have evolved in parallel. The early days of schematics and hand placement gave way to the Xilinx ISE toolset, later replaced by the Vivado Design Suite in 2012. This was extended further in 2019 with the launch of the Vitis unified software platform, enabling engineers to create High Level Synthesis IP and stitch them together into a system. The most recent release, Vitis 2025.1, enhances design flows with Versal AI engines, giving a sense of what’s next.
That’s because FPGAs have moved far beyond networking and defence where they found a natural home in the 1990s. Think aerospace and telecommunications, automotive and industrial automation, medical devices and financial services, data centres and wireless networks, robotics and space, and now AI and IoT where FPGAs, adaptive SOCs and System-on-Modules (SOMs) are enabling further innovations.
Where it’s all headed is the exciting part, and that’s where the upcoming keynote at FPGA Horizons comes in. In AMD: 40 Years of FPGA Innovations, AMD Senior Director Michael Hutchison will cover the journey from the XC2064 to AMD’s latest adaptive computing platforms – and those that will be coming in the future. Expect insights into evolving design tools, emerging use cases, and what FPGA development could look like a decade from now.
Four decades along on the FPGA journey, it’s an opportunity to reflect, retool and plan ahead. Whether you’re keen to revisit the history, explore the latest silicon, or navigate future design strategies, this keynote promises plenty to take away.
Photo by Miguel A Amutio on Unsplash
