40th Anniversary of the FPGA
Today, at Sundance, after reading a post by Adam from Adiuvo about this year marking the 40th anniversary of the FPGA, we were prompted to look back at our first FPGA offering – the SMT219.
First launched on 15th April 1995 in collaboration with Oxford University, the SMT219 HARP module was a tool that enabled mathematically rigorous hardware design through software-based methods. Designed for high-performance embedded applications, HARP supports rapid, millisecond-scale reconfiguration for tasks such as video-motion tracking, systolic array processing, data compression, and pattern matching.
The module integrated a Xilinx FPGA (3195 or 3190) with a 32-bit T425 transputer. It was programmable using the HANDEL environment, a language similar to Occam, enabling significant performance gains for existing Occam-based solutions. Conforming to the size 4 TRAM format, HARP could be deployed in various host systems or in parallel TRAM configurations.
SMT219 Features:
- Size 4 HARP TRAM
- Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Array 3195 or 3190
- 128KBytes of local SRAM for FPGA
- Dynamic reconfiguration of FPGA via transputer
- Programmable frequency synthesiser from 1 to 100MHz
- Four parallel Input/Output ports support multiple SMT219 systems
- T805 (30MHz) and 4MBytes DRAM
- Mathematically based compilation tools
- Four 20MBit/s links and full subsystem control
The web page for the SMT219 from January 1997 can be found on the Wayback Machine.
And for a full, in-depth look back at the SMT219 module, Ram Meenakshisundaram has a full write-up here:
Over the past four decades, FPGAs have evolved from relatively small, low-density logic devices into highly sophisticated, heterogeneous computing platforms capable of supporting complex, real-time workloads. Early FPGAs offered limited logic resources, modest clock speeds, and minimal on-chip memory, making them suitable primarily for simple glue logic or prototyping tasks.
Today’s FPGAs feature millions of logic cells, advanced DSP blocks, high-bandwidth memory interfaces, hardened processors, and extensive connectivity options such as multi-gigabit transceivers. Modern toolchains provide higher-level design abstraction, automated optimisation, and improved verification capabilities, significantly reducing development time. As a result, FPGAs have transitioned from niche programmable components to central enablers of high-performance computing, embedded AI acceleration, communications infrastructure, and rapid, application-specific hardware innovation.