What if you could use software to design hardware? Not just any hardware–imagine specifying the behavior of a complex parallel computer, sending it to a chip, and having it run on that chip–all without any manufacturing? With Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), you can design such a machine with your mouse and keyboard. When you deploy it to the FPGA, it immediately takes on the behavior that you defined. Want to create something that behaves like a display driver integrated circuit? How about a CPU with an instruction set you dreamed up? Or your very own Bitcoin miner You can do all this with FPGAs.

Because you’re not writing programs–rather, you’re designing a chip whose sole purpose is to do what you tell it–it’s faster than anything you can do in code. With Make: FPGAs, you’ll learn how to break down problems into something that can be solved on an FPGA, design the logic that will run on your FPGA, and hook up electronic components to create finished projects.