History
Sinclair Research ported an enhanced ZX80 design to a ULA chip for the ZX81, and later used a ULA in the ZX Spectrum. A compatible chip was made in Russia as T34VG1. Acorn Computers used several ULA chips in the BBC Micro, and later managed to compress almost all of that machine's logic into a single ULA for the Acorn Electron. Many other manufacturers from the time of the home computer boom period used ULAs in their machines. Ferranti in the UK pioneered ULA technology, then later abandoned this lead in semi-custom chips. The IBM PC took over much of the personal computer market, and the sales volumes made full-custom chips more economical.
Designers still wished for a way to create their own complex chips without the expense of full-custom design, and eventually this wish was granted with the arrival of the field-programmable gate array (FPGA), complex programmable logic device (CPLD), and Structured ASIC. Whereas a ULA required a semiconductor wafer foundry to deposit and etch the interconnections, the FPGA and CPLD had programmable interconnections.
Read more about this topic: Gate Array
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)