question: Has field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology been used to solve sequence alignment problems?
answer: Yes. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are reconfigurable computing platforms that have found several applications in diverse domains, including  digital signal processing, medical imaging and bioinformatics. Specific applications of FPGAs for biological sequence alignment have been reported for dynamic programming-based pairwise (local or global) sequence alignment, progressive multiple sequence alignment, profile alignment, Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT) based alignment, heuristic pairwise alignment.