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:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“To summarize the contentions of this paper then. Firstly, the phrase ‘the meaning of a word’ is a spurious phrase. Secondly and consequently, a re-examination is needed of phrases like the two which I discuss, ‘being a part of the meaning of’ and ‘having the same meaning.’ On these matters, dogmatists require prodding: although history indeed suggests that it may sometimes be better to let sleeping dogmatists lie.”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)