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]

Most FIs using mircoprocessors or highly integrated microcontrollers, like megasquirt which uses a
68hc908 (6800 derivative, 8-bit architecture, it's not a 68000 clone, even if there is only one zero
missing in the name (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) )

ooops, faux pas on my end.
somehow 68000 is stuck in my head. haven't done any ASM on those in years tho.
anywho, the MS cpu is 8 bit, which is kinda weak, but the good news is that they didn't fill up the kernel with too much stuff, still plenty of space in there for additional code ...

Andy