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Since their introduction, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have grown in capacity by more than a factor of 10 000 and in performance by a factor of 100. Cost and energy per operation have both decreased by more than a factor of 1000. These advances have been fueled by process technology scaling, but the FPGA story is much more complex than simple technology scaling. Quantitative effects of Moore's Law have driven qualitative changes in FPGA architecture, applications and tools. As a consequence, FPGAs have passed through several distinct phases of development. These phases, termed ''Ages'' in this paper, are The Age of Invention, The Age of Expansion and The Age of Accumulation. This paper summarizes each and discusses their driving pressures and fundamental characteristics. The paper concludes with a vision of the upcoming Age of FPGAs.

This paper discusses all aspects of FPGA security and trust.

Using FPGAs, a designer can separate the design process from the manufacturing flow. Therefore, the owner of a sensitive design need not expose the design to possible theft and tampering during its manufacture, dramatically simplifying the process of assuring trust in that design. Modern FPGAs include bitstream security features that turn the fielded design trust problem into an information security problem, with well-known cryptographic information security solutions. The generic nature of the FPGA base array allows the validation expense to be amortized over all designs targeted to that base array. Even the task of checking design tools is simplified by using non-destructive checks of the FPGA design.

No abstract