For what it's worth, I've got a couple of EE degrees and put in about two years as a digital designer. However, both the schooling and the experience are ancient. How ancient? Well, we used to think it was really cool to wire up a PROM and a latch to make little programmable state machines. That should give you an idea. Then I went over to the dark side (software) where ones are ones and zeros are zeros and sort of forgot about nasty, real world things like rise times and propagation delays and race conditions and such.

Maybe this FPGA obsession is a geeky variant of the midlife crisis, the longing for the past, the desire to regain lost youth. I certainly hope so, as it's sure to require lots less maintenance than either the red Corvette or the requisite blonde accessory thereto.

-- Russ