Programmable automation controllers (PACs) are gaining broader acceptance in the industrial control market for applications that require highly integrated analog and digital I/O, floating-point processing, and seamless connectivity to multiple processing nodes. Another benefits of PACs, due their use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), is their unique level of programmability. This level of programming is possible because an FPGA is a chip that consists of many unconfigured logic gates. Unlike the fixed, vendor-defined functionality of an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chip, you can configure and reconfigure the logic on FPGAs for your specific application.
