The FPPA concept has been developed in 1996 to address two main goals. The first one is to develop massively parallel processing unit arraya that require large chip areas, and the second one is to obtain a good substratum for evolutive algorithms. The proposed solution is an array of cells, in which each cell contains a small low-power processor and a hierarchy of memories. The FPPA is a single-chip MIMP machine that should be considered as a very coarse grain FPGA.