Tabula rakes in $108 million to develop cheap, programmable chips

Compared to similarly customizable FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), Tabula's chips are cheaper, smaller, and faster. This magic trifecta of attributes could put programmable logic into consumer products like HDTVs and may one day allow for hardware to be updated over the internet the way software is now. However, the immediate promise is being able to use the same chip for multiple purposes across several products. That should drive down costs -- and there's no way to make consumers happier than by slashing prices.