Maybe you're thinking of EPROMs? I can't think of anything else that you'd need UV light for. Even then the UV was used to erase them, not write.
Comment on INSIDE those OLD pinball machines
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 9 months agoProbably not especially. But aren’t they basically wires burnt in circuit, made programmable via (UV?) light.
WHYAREWEALLCAPS@kbin.social 9 months ago
frezik@midwest.social 9 months ago
Modern FPGAs don’t use UV light, but maybe earlier ones did? As you say, EEPROMs used UV for erasing before writing again.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 9 months ago
…those chips with the round window in the center, what were they again?
TimeSquirrel@kbin.social 9 months ago
They're just massive arrays of unconnected gates, flipflops, and other basic digital circuitry that the user "connects" up into a custom circuit like you said. The components are already there. I suppose an FPGA could easily have analog circuit blocks ready to use too. I'm not an expert. Just a microcontroller guy, haven't dived into FPGAs yet.
WaterWaiver@aussie.zone 9 months ago
No. Modern FPGAs do not use any UV light or have any windows. For storage they use flash memory (same as what’s used in MicroSD cards, USB sticks and SSDs).
Old EPROM (not EEPROM) storage had windows and needed UV to erase, but that’s decades old. I’m not sure if FPGA was common nomenclature back then (PALs/GALs/CPLDs were probably the market).
anlumo@lemmy.world 9 months ago
They’re still digital (a wire is either 0 or 1), which isn’t more useful for this than a regular CPU.
What they do excel in is doing stuff in parallel, because there is no linear list of instructions, everything can happen at the same time (unless you specifically block something until a certain signal is sent).