With interest growing in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)—witness Amazon’s recent addition of AWS EC2 instances that include dedicated FPGAs—this episode of the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast looks at what FPGAs are and how their capabilities are different from microcontroller boards (such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi). Jeff Bleiel and I speak with Ryan Cousins, co-founder and CEO of KRTKL (pronounced “critical”), the makers of Snickerdoodle, a board that’s based on an ARM/FPGA hybrid chip.