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Very roughly speaking, you may consider your microcontroller as an FPGA someone configured for you the way he liked it. You can use it , but its design can't be changed. Generic FPGAs, however, can be configured any way you like. You can build your own micro with a unique ISA, add some peripheral devices, as much RAM and ROM as you actually need, and ports of any size and functionality you fancy. On top of that, such a micro can be much faster and more sophisticated than any PIC, MOT, or AVR uC you've ever seen.
Of course there are many more differences, but the space is too limited to list them all. Use the "Search" button to learn more.
Regardss, yego
microcontroller as an FPGA someone configured for you the way he liked it. You can use it , but its design can't be changed. Generic FPGAs, however, can be configured any way you like. You can build your own micro with a unique ISA, add some peripheral devices, as much RAM and ROM as you actually need, and ports of any size and functionality you fancy. On top of that, such a micro can be much faster and more sophisticated than any PIC, MOT, or AVR uC you've ever seen.
Take it literally.
Of course there are books, but the most important resource needed for this task you have under your hat. There are no good books on the subject. Some i-net materials are available, but there is no complete course on how to design your own RISC or CISC pipelined CPU. You must either copy someone's idea or invent your own based on your experience.
Good source of simplified cores is opencores.com. Also there are some simple CPUs available from FPGA vendors. Altera offers NIOS, Xilinx offers Pico and MicroBlaze, but those are quite rudimentary designs with little imagination. Their strong point, however, is a more or less complete tool chain and some peripherals. Again you may like it or not but those so called "soft IP cores" are usually available without source code ( well they are available, but cost a lot), so they are not to be really changed. So those are kind of ready made for U.
So going back to the topic, the most basic concept to start your own design is '0' and '1' . The rest is up to your imagination.
An FPGA is what you call everything including the kitchen sink, a visit to the opencore site's (MCU cores in FPGA format) will show you that yes, you can build a fully featured mico controller on an FPGA. But can you do it in an 8pin dip/soic format that can run at close to 16mhz, drive TTL/cmos logic, low powered LED's for only a couple dollars a chip with NO supporting logic. low power usage and simple programming tools? Essentially Microcontrollers and FPGA's are NOT related in structure in ANY way. Any FPGA can be programmed to emulate the functions of a micro controller but you can't just snap your fingers and shrink an FPGA, or create robust hardware pereripherals/drivers out of thin air. They're not even compareable on the same page really. They're COMPLETLY different devices.
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. The rest is up to your imagination.