FPGA's logic cells, it appeared somehow to take advantage of clusters of other cells nearby.

ECONOMIST: REPORT: EVOLVABLE HARDWARE

E5, and it combines a microprocessor with 3, 200 reconfigurable logic cells, a chunk of memory, and a number of other components.

ECONOMIST: Hardware goes soft

Instead of being fixed, a string of bits specifies the chip's design by telling it what linkages to forge between its various components (in this case, groups of transistors known as logic cells).

ECONOMIST: REPORT: EVOLVABLE HARDWARE

The Adaptive Wireless Engine, as it is called, is a device whose logic cells have been specifically designed to handle signal filtering, speech encoding, wireless communications protocols, and so on in other words, the sorts of things that mobile phones have to do.

ECONOMIST: Hardware goes soft