The person might have meant a FPGA (field programmable gate array).
You can "re-wire" the internal circuitry of these chips to create a processor
which has special functions.
For example, suppose you need a PIC which has 5 serial ports. You could
"program" an FPGA to use 10 i/o pins as serial port pins.
A FPGA has some number of basic gates (like 10K), which you have at
your disposal. These gates can be reconfigured to create timers, counters,
arithmetic units, registers, decision control circuits, etc. The downside of using FPGAs is that you have to program the CPU itself -- that is, you have
to specify how instructions are handled by your processor.
See fpga4fun.com for some more info.