A diversion into FPGAs

Last week’s exploration of “processing with limited computing power” a few decades ago has led me into another direction which turned out to be mesmerising and addictive… All due to a chip called a Field Programmable Logic Array, which usually looks like this: That’s a lot of pins - large FPGA’s can have over 1,000 pins, in fact! What are they? What’s the point? Why are they so hard to use?