By way of introduction -- from Wikipedia:

NEC Electronics Corporation was separated from NEC in 2002 as a new semiconductor company. NEC Laboratories America, Inc. (NEC Labs) started in November, 2002 as a merger of NEC Research Institute (NECI) and NEC USA’s Computer and Communications Research Laboratory (CCRL). NEC built the Earth Simulator Computer (ESC), the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004, and since produced the NEC N343i in 2006.

On April 23, 2009, Renesas Technology Corp and NEC Electronics Corp struck a basic agreement to merge by around April 2010. On April 1, 2010 NEC Electronics and Renesas Technology merged forming Renesas Electronics which is set to be fourth largest semiconductor company according to iSuppli published data.

The full index to this series is here: http://www.renesas.com/edge_ol/engineer/index.jsp

I will note that their suggestion of using an FPGA to do the flashing LED is far far far more complicated than it needs to be. Two AND gates, a decade counter and a timer are all you'd really need to make it flash after hitting the button. Adding a reset could be as simple as another button or another counter depending on how you want to go about it (or if you get creative, i bet it could be done with a JK flipflop).

Though adding the MCU (or an FPGA) does allow you do far more than just flashing it at some interval, you can also make it fade in and out far easier, and a number of other things like that.

You can flash LEDs in an even easier manner with a capacitor and a couple of transistors, or just a single 555 chip ;-)

They wanted the behavior of flashing a set time after the button is pushed, I'd use a 555 for the flashing myself though :)

For all those recently into the Arduino posts on HN, this seems like a nice start (starting at lesson 1) into electronics. http://www.renesas.com/edge_ol/engineer/01/index.jsp