Distinctions
CPLDs were an evolutionary step from even smaller devices that preceded them, PLAs (first shipped by Signetics), and PALs. These in turn were preceded by standard logic products, that offered no programmability and were "programmed" by wiring several standard logic chips together.
The main distinction between FPGA and CPLD device architectures is that FPGAs are internally based on look-up tables (LUTs) while CPLDs form the logic functions with sea-of-gates (for example, sum of products).
Read more about this topic: Complex Programmable Logic Device
Famous quotes containing the word distinctions:
“...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“Distinctions drawn by the mind are not necessarily equivalent to distinctions in reality.”
—Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274)
“Again we have here two distinctions that are no distinctions, but made to seem so by terms invented by I know not whom to cover ignorance, and blind the understanding of the reader: for it cannot be conceived that there is any liberty greater, than for a man to do what he will.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)