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INSIDE those OLD pinball machines
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this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Probably not especially. But aren't they basically wires burnt in circuit, made programmable via (UV?) light.
They're still digital (a wire is either 0 or 1), which isn’t more useful for this than a regular CPU.
What they do excel in is doing stuff in parallel, because there is no linear list of instructions, everything can happen at the same time (unless you specifically block something until a certain signal is sent).
Maybe you're thinking of EPROMs? I can't think of anything else that you'd need UV light for. Even then the UV was used to erase them, not write.
Modern FPGAs don't use UV light, but maybe earlier ones did? As you say, EEPROMs used UV for erasing before writing again.
...now i'm getting confused. Those chips with the round window in the center, what were they again?
No. Modern FPGAs do not use any UV light or have any windows. For storage they use flash memory (same as what's used in MicroSD cards, USB sticks and SSDs). Some (most?) require you to provide this yourself externally.
Old EPROM (not EEPROM) storage had windows and needed UV to erase, but that's decades old. I'm not sure if FPGA was common nomenclature back then (PAL/GAL/CPLD were probably the market).