FI programming geek question, what chips do they use? Options

[need4speed]

I'm still a drooler, but I may have my first 914 in a couple of weeks if things work out.

And I'm already dreaming of building my own FI system (though the car I'm looking at is a 1.8 with what the owner says is a good, working L-Jet system).

And I'm wondering - has anybody ever seen an FI brain that uses an FPGA chip, instead of a regular chip designed for the task?

A buddy of mine works at Xylinx, and he explained to me about these FPGA chips - mostly used in routers and stuff - it's basically a big array of programmable gates, and you can load a program on by physically configuring the gates a certain way, and then, instead of loading software in to run on the chip - the chip works as if it's a custom designed IC. I kind of thought I'd like to try using something like this - I'm not a really experienced programmer, but I have worked with computers for 12 years, and I've always wanted to take on a project like this.

Any thoughts?

[SirAndy]

The Megasquirt is based on a variant of the 68000 that has embedded eeprom and some ram.

yepp. a cheap-o 8-Bit 68000 clone. no FPU either. makes for fun floating point operations ...
good thing i used to do OS programming in assembler way before anyone even thought about a FPU (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif)

Andy