So question: my understanding was th atat one point the cadence hardware emulators weren't FPGA based at their core, but instead custom chips with a sea of little one bit processors that only knew about logic ops (with some FPGAs for interchip routing). Is Cadence using FPGAs for logic now too?
Yes. Cadence now has two products. One is custom chip based emulator. Another is FPGA based. I worked on the first version of FPGA based emulator.