This is IMPORTANT. Really.

What just happened

I just saw the announcement of the “CLEAR Open Source FPGA ASIC”. This integrated circuit is

“delivered to you on its development board and its open source software development tools and all the ASIC design tools used to create it. That’s for you to create your own - yes that’s right - ASIC."

First, allow me a couple of definitions

ASIC means “Application-Specific Integrated Circuits”, FPGA stands for “Field-Programmable Gate Array” and both definitions are much less difficult to understand than they may appear at first sight.

An ASIC is just what its name says: a tiny square of silicon wrapped in a flat plastic case, filled with millions of transistors that are connected to do just one thing, as efficiently as possible. That is the only real difference between an ASIC and the general-purpose microprocessors that are the core of every mobile or “fixed” computer. A microprocessor can do everything you can pass to it in the form of a softwar program, from video editing to games, word processing and so on.

An ASIC, instead, does not need any software to work, but is, and only does, the ONE thing, e.g. modem , internet packet switching, brake control system… for which it was designed and built.

An FPGA is (simplyfing a lot!) an integrated circuit whose internal transistors can be connected in a different way every time you turn it, following the instructions in a “programming file”. This means that you can implement very different functions, or different versions of the same function, using always the same integrated circuit on the same board.

As a rule, FPGAs are slower and consume more power than ASICs doing the same thing, but their flexibility more than compensates those limitations in many, many practical cases.

This is EXTREMELY important because…

Our current world runs on software, and software gets all the coverage. But software cannot exist without hardware to run on.

We should all be really happy whenever more projects and products like CLEAR start, because it is ASICs, FPGAs and microelectronics in general, that actually make all YOUR world work.