Chapter | 1 The Fundamentals 3 Insider Info These design-start numbers are a little hard to pin down because it's difficult to get everyone to agree what a "design start" actually is. In the case of an ASIC, for example, should we include designs that are canceled in the middle, or should we only consider designs that make it all the way to tape-out? Things become even fluffier when it comes to FPGAs due to their reconfigurability. Perhaps even more telling is the fact that, after pointing me toward an FPGA-centric industry analyst's Web site, a representative from one FPGA vendor added, "But the values given there aren't very accurate." When I asked why, he replied with a sly grin, "Mainly because we don't provide him with very good data!" APPLICATIONS When they first arrived on the scene in the mid-1980s, FPGAs were largely used to implement glue logic, medium-complexity state machines, and rela- tively limited data processing tasks. During the early 1990s, as the size and sophistication of FPGAs started to increase, their big markets at that time were in the telecommunications and networking arenas, both of which involved pro- cessing large blocks of data and pushing that data around. Later, toward the