At Xilinx’s developer conference, the FPGA developer announced a partnership with ARM that sees ARM’s Cortex-M CPU design be made freely available in Xilinx FPGA designs, without fees or royalties. As well as the launch of Xilinx’s ACAP products, outlined back in March, the FPGA world has seen Lattice Semiconductor update its network-edge focus, looking to entice embedded developers. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are essentially reprogrammable chips, which can be customized in the field to optimize them for a specific computation task. The gist of their value is that they provide flexibility, allowing a user to create a system that can outperform general-purpose processors, like CPUs or MCUs. There are alternatives to FPGAs, chiefly ASICs, but these do not…