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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.