Recently, I tried entering for a contest on http://Hackster.io, to use the FPGA to create intelligence on the edge (I didn’t get it). One of the questions that was thrown to entrants of the competition was to explain what an FPGA was to a fifth grader. While the questions gave way to multitude of assumptions, the safest assumptions were; the fifth grader in question, knows what a computer is; the fifth grader isn’t some wunderkind with deep understanding of VLSI design and computer architecture ( this would be nice though).

Given the two safe assumptions, I pondered for a short while, what simple analogies to use that wouldn’t miss the entire point of FPGAs.

Lego!!!!…. yes Lego bricks!!…the answer finally came to me, and in minutes i typed the short reply on my phone.

Toys are awesome, great, interesting, super awesome if you have the latest toys; but guess what kid, you just can’t have all the toys!. But wait, what if you could?. Imagine for a moment that you had a toy which could be put apart easily and used to build yet another toy. Imagine, LEGO bricks, but where each brick can be shape shifted, to make even more awesome toys that aren’t SQUARE!!. Today, you’ve got the transformers collection, and tomorrow, you may even get the Disney car collection, and all the awesome toys, even those yet to be invented. This would be just the perfect toy, reshaped to suit very kids need and mood, Barbie today, and dragons tomorrow. Now Kid, processors are just like your toys, they’re awesome, they make us happy by doing what we want them to do; making video games possible, and keeping our money safe in the bank. But much like it would be boring to playing with optimus prime toy all day, sometimes we don’t want our processor to do the same stuff. And the shape shifting LEGO-like version of the awesome processor is the programmable Logic. And much like your sweet sweet toy, we can connect this programmable logic in different ways for other awesome things, and not have to buy a new toy(processor) each time. This allows computer engineers to come up with even more fantastic products to make us all Happy.

The whole point of programmable logic was definitely not lost in this example, and there we have it FPGA explained to the fifth grader