What is Island-Style Routing

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are integrated circuits whose logic and their interconnections are configurable. These devices are field-programmable, that is, they can be configured by the hardware designer without any intervention of the manufacturer. Most FPGAs can be reprogrammed as many times as we want with a vast variety of digital circuits. Some recent FPGA families are system-on-chips (SoC) with one or more microprocessor cores, memory, cache, and reconfigurable logic allowing the implementation of complex hardware/software systems in a single programmable device. This article focuses on the architecture of FPGAs, including the so called SoC FPGA. It explains the main blocks of the FPGA, how they have evolved along the last decades and the perspectives of next generation FPGAs. It also describes some applicability areas and how its architecture have evolved to adapt to some of these target markets.