FPGAs are an amazing product that almost shouldn't exist if you think about the business and marketing concerns. They are a product that is too expensive at scale. If an application takes off, it is eventually cheaper and more performant to switch to ASICs, which is obvious when you see the 4-digit prices of the most sophisticated FPGAs.
Given how ruinously expensive silicon products are to bring to market, it's amazing that there are multiple companies competing (albeit in distinct segments).
FPGAs also seem like a largely untapped domain in general purpose computing, a bit like GPUs used to be. The ability to reprogram an FPGA to implement a new digital circuit in milliseconds would be a game changer for many workloads, except that current CPUs and GPUs are already very capable.
kev009 · 4h ago
For a while in the 2000s Cisco was one of the biggest users of FPGAs. If you consider how complicated digital designs have been for many decades, and the costs of associated failures, FPGAs can certainly be cost neutral at scale, especially accounting for risk and reputational damage, into production lines.
Also there is a large gamut and pretty much always has been for decades of programmable logic.. some useful parts are not much more than a mid range microcontroller. The top end is for DoD, system emulation, novel frontier/capture regimes (like "AI", autonomous vehicles).. few people ever work on those compared to the cheaper parts.
duskwuff · 3h ago
FPGAs are still quite common in niche hardware like oscilloscopes or cell towers, where the manufacturer needs some sophisticated hardware capabilities but isn't manufacturing enough units to make the NRE for an ASIC worthwhile.
stephen_g · 1h ago
Also time to market - I have a friend who worked for Alcatel Lucent and they would use FPGAs while Nokia would use ASICs, they saw it as a big advantage since if there was a problem in part of the ASIC, or if you needed new features that were outside the original scope, the time and cost to respin was massive over fixing problems or implementing new standards in the FPGA bitstream!
Eventually Nokia ended up buying Alcatel Lucent and not too long after he left, not sure what their current strategy is.
inamberclad · 5h ago
The problem is that the tools are still weak. The languages are difficult to use, nobody has made something more widely adopted than Verilog or VHDL. In addition, the IDEs are proprietary and the tools are fragile and not reproduceable. Synthesis results can vary from run to run on the exact same code with the same parameters, with real world impacts on performance. This all conspires to make FPGA development only suitable for bespoke products with narrow use cases.
I would love to see the open source world come to the rescue here. There are some very nice open source tools for Lattice FPGAs and Lattice's lawyers have essentially agreed to let the open source tools continue unimpeded (they're undoubtedly driving sales), but the chips themselves can't compete with the likes of Xilinx.
petra · 4h ago
//If an application takes off, it is eventually cheaper and more performant to switch to ASICs,
That's part of the FPGA business model - they have an automated way to take an FPGA design and turn it into a validated semi-custom ASIC, at low NRE, at silicon nodes(10nm?) you wouldn't have access to otherwise.
And all of that at a much lower risk. This is a strong rational but also emotional appeal. And people are highly influenced by that.
duskwuff · 4h ago
Is this still an active thing? My understanding is that both Xilinx and Altera/Intel have effectively discontinued their ASIC programs (Xilinx EasyPath, Altera HardCopy); they aren't available for modern part families.
For what it's worth, Xilinx EasyPath was never actually ASIC. The parts delivered were still FPGAs; they were just FPGAs with a reduced testing program focusing on functionality used by the customer's design.
I'd be amazed if that were still possible, in fact. Real-world FPGA designs lean heavily on the vendor's proprietary IP, which won't port straight across to ASICs any more than the LUT-based FPGA fabric will.
Anyone who claims to turn a modern FPGA design into an ASIC "automatically" is selling snake oil.
duskwuff · 3h ago
Oh, these programs were always in-house. The offering was essentially "if you pay an up-front fee and give us your FPGA design, we'll sell you some chips that run that design for cheaper than the FPGAs". If there was ever any custom silicon involved - which there may have been for Altera, but probably not for Xilinx - the design files for it were never made available to the customer.
15155 · 5h ago
> The ability to reprogram an FPGA to implement a new digital circuit in milliseconds would be a game changer for many workloads
Someone has to design each of those reconfigurable digital circuits and take them through an implementation flow.
Only certain problems map well to easy FPGA implementation: anything involving memory access is quite tedious.
bigfatkitten · 2h ago
> which is obvious when you see the 4-digit prices of the most sophisticated FPGAs.
I mean, it's not like people producing products with those parts actually pay that for production though, except for some really tiny volume ones (such as some defence projects).
Companies make products based around FPGAs and can sell the whole thing for less than you could buy just the single FPGA part for on a place like Digi-key. It's just part of the FPGA companies' business models. In volume the price will be far smaller.
bigfatkitten · 1h ago
At that end of the market they cost an astronomical amount of money, no matter what.
The $140,000 device doesn’t become a $400 device in any volume; it might become a $90,000 device.
bluGill · 3h ago
There are a large number of products that will never sell enough to be worth going to an ASIC.
kvemkon · 1h ago
> The ability to reprogram an FPGA to implement a new digital circuit in milliseconds would be a game changer for many workloads,..
Only 47 milliseconds from power-on to operational.
Lattice Avant™-G FPGA: Boot Up Time Demo (12.12.2023)
> They are a product that is too expensive at scale. If an application takes off, it is eventually cheaper and more performant to switch to ASICs
Isn't that same thing: Too expensive to scale, so you switch to ASIC ?
maxdamantus · 1h ago
> Too expensive to scale, so you switch to ASIC ?
I think it's not so much about too expensive, but once you've got the resources it will always be better to switch to an ASIC.
Not a hardware engineer, but it seems obvious to me that any circuitry implemented using an FPGA will be physically bigger with more "wiring" (more resistance, more energy, more heat) than the equivalent ASIC, and accordingly the tolerances will need to be larger so clock speeds will be lower.
Basically, at scale an ASIC will always win out over an FPGA, unless your application is basically "give the user an FPGA" (but this is begging the question—unless your users are hardware engineers this can't be a goal).
checker659 · 5h ago
I think FPGAs (or CGRAs really) will make a comeback once LLMs can directly generate FPGA bitstreams.
throwawayabcdef · 1h ago
No need. I gave ChatGPT this prompt: "Write a data mover in Xilinx HLS with Vitis flow that takes in a stream of bytes, swaps pairs of bytes, then streams the bytes out"
And it did a good job. The code it made probably works fine and will run on most Xilinx FPGAs.
15155 · 5h ago
What does "directly generate FPGA bitstreams" mean?
Placement and routing is an NP-Complete problem.
duskwuff · 4h ago
And I certainly can't imagine how a language model would be of any use here, in a problem which doesn't involve language.
15155 · 4h ago
They are "okay" at generating RTL, but are likely never going to be able to generate actual bitstreams without some classical implementation flow in there.
buildbot · 3h ago
I think in theory, given terabytes of bitstreams, you might be able to get an LLM to output valid designs. Excepting hardened IP blocks, a bitstream is literally a sequence of sram configuration bits to set the routing tables and LUTs. Given the right type of positional encoding I think you could maybe get simple designs working at a small scale.
CamperBob2 · 3h ago
I'd expect a diffusion model to outperform autoregressive LLMs dramatically.
Open source toolchain for the development of FPGAs of multiple vendors. Currently, it targets the Xilinx 7-Series, Lattice iCE40, Lattice ECP5 FPGAs, QuickLogic EOS S3 and is gradually being expanded to provide a comprehensive end-to-end FPGA synthesis flow.
> There’s already IP cores for DRAM, PCI express, ethernet, video, a softcore CPU (your choice of or1k or lm32) and more.. LiteX produces a design that uses about 20% of an XC7A50 FPGA with a runtime of about 10 minutes, whereas Vivado produces a design that consumes 85% of the same FPGA with a runtime of about 30-45 minutes.
> you can.. get [FPGA] parts for significant discounts in 1-off quantities through legit Chinese distributors like LCSC. For example, a XC7A35T-2FGG484I is 90$ on Digikey and 20$ at LCSC. I think a personalized deal for that part would be cheaper than 20$ though...
anon-3988 · 2h ago
Do you think its possible for someone to enter the industry through this open source solution? I have always wanted to play around with FPGAs but have no idea where to even begin.
transpute · 2h ago
Some contributors to the open hardware community (https://fossi-foundation.org/events/archive) can be followed on social media. See videos from FOSSI conferences and comments in these HN threads:
Not an FPGA, but if you already have a recent Ryzen device, the AMD NPU might be worth a look, with Xilinx lineage and current AI/LLM market frenzy, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43671940
> The Versal AI Engine is the NPU. And the Ryzen CPUs NPU is almost exactly a Versal AI Engine IP block to the point that in the Linux kernel they share the same driver (amdxdna) and the reference material the kernel docs link to for the Ryzen NPUs is the Versal SoC's AI Engine architecture reference manual.
fpgas are underrated. insane control, hard realtime, tweak logic without touching hardware. and still holding grounds in hft, telecom basebands, satellite payloads, broadcast gear, lab instruments, even some cloud accelerators like aws f1. anywhere latency's tight but logic keeps changing. most move to asic when design's stable but if your workload evolves or margins depend on latency, fpga's the only sane option
fluorinerocket · 4h ago
National Instruments made programming FPGAs accessible to engineers who are not EEs like me via LabVIEW. It was really cool to have loops running at tens of kHz up to 100MHz speeds
It's really too bad that it was locked to NI products and they've kind faded away.
I sometimes like to think of what could have been, if the ability to program FPGAs so easily would have become more popular.
EarlKing · 2h ago
Just a note: At the bottom of the page they mention a book on Embedded System Design that they contributed to but there's no link. It took a little digging but I found the book they're talking about: https://us.artechhouse.com/A-Hands-On-Guide-to-Designing-Emb...
Waterluvian · 3h ago
On the 40th anniversary I will confess that for most of my career I thought the “field” in FPGA meant like a field of gates.
kvemkon · 3h ago
Recently posted:
The FPGA turns 40. Where does it go from here? (11.06.2025)
Given how ruinously expensive silicon products are to bring to market, it's amazing that there are multiple companies competing (albeit in distinct segments).
FPGAs also seem like a largely untapped domain in general purpose computing, a bit like GPUs used to be. The ability to reprogram an FPGA to implement a new digital circuit in milliseconds would be a game changer for many workloads, except that current CPUs and GPUs are already very capable.
Also there is a large gamut and pretty much always has been for decades of programmable logic.. some useful parts are not much more than a mid range microcontroller. The top end is for DoD, system emulation, novel frontier/capture regimes (like "AI", autonomous vehicles).. few people ever work on those compared to the cheaper parts.
Eventually Nokia ended up buying Alcatel Lucent and not too long after he left, not sure what their current strategy is.
I would love to see the open source world come to the rescue here. There are some very nice open source tools for Lattice FPGAs and Lattice's lawyers have essentially agreed to let the open source tools continue unimpeded (they're undoubtedly driving sales), but the chips themselves can't compete with the likes of Xilinx.
That's part of the FPGA business model - they have an automated way to take an FPGA design and turn it into a validated semi-custom ASIC, at low NRE, at silicon nodes(10nm?) you wouldn't have access to otherwise.
And all of that at a much lower risk. This is a strong rational but also emotional appeal. And people are highly influenced by that.
For what it's worth, Xilinx EasyPath was never actually ASIC. The parts delivered were still FPGAs; they were just FPGAs with a reduced testing program focusing on functionality used by the customer's design.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/eas...
Anyone who claims to turn a modern FPGA design into an ASIC "automatically" is selling snake oil.
Someone has to design each of those reconfigurable digital circuits and take them through an implementation flow.
Only certain problems map well to easy FPGA implementation: anything involving memory access is quite tedious.
6-digit at the high end.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/amd/XCVU29P-3FSGA...
Companies make products based around FPGAs and can sell the whole thing for less than you could buy just the single FPGA part for on a place like Digi-key. It's just part of the FPGA companies' business models. In volume the price will be far smaller.
The $140,000 device doesn’t become a $400 device in any volume; it might become a $90,000 device.
Only 47 milliseconds from power-on to operational.
Lattice Avant™-G FPGA: Boot Up Time Demo (12.12.2023)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4NUVYyLUxc
I think it's not so much about too expensive, but once you've got the resources it will always be better to switch to an ASIC.
Not a hardware engineer, but it seems obvious to me that any circuitry implemented using an FPGA will be physically bigger with more "wiring" (more resistance, more energy, more heat) than the equivalent ASIC, and accordingly the tolerances will need to be larger so clock speeds will be lower.
Basically, at scale an ASIC will always win out over an FPGA, unless your application is basically "give the user an FPGA" (but this is begging the question—unless your users are hardware engineers this can't be a goal).
And it did a good job. The code it made probably works fine and will run on most Xilinx FPGAs.
Placement and routing is an NP-Complete problem.
> There’s already IP cores for DRAM, PCI express, ethernet, video, a softcore CPU (your choice of or1k or lm32) and more.. LiteX produces a design that uses about 20% of an XC7A50 FPGA with a runtime of about 10 minutes, whereas Vivado produces a design that consumes 85% of the same FPGA with a runtime of about 30-45 minutes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836745#39922534
> you can.. get [FPGA] parts for significant discounts in 1-off quantities through legit Chinese distributors like LCSC. For example, a XC7A35T-2FGG484I is 90$ on Digikey and 20$ at LCSC. I think a personalized deal for that part would be cheaper than 20$ though...
2023, "FPGA Dev Boards for $150 or Less", 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38161215
2021, "FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain", 70 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25720531
Not an FPGA, but if you already have a recent Ryzen device, the AMD NPU might be worth a look, with Xilinx lineage and current AI/LLM market frenzy, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43671940
> The Versal AI Engine is the NPU. And the Ryzen CPUs NPU is almost exactly a Versal AI Engine IP block to the point that in the Linux kernel they share the same driver (amdxdna) and the reference material the kernel docs link to for the Ryzen NPUs is the Versal SoC's AI Engine architecture reference manual.
At one point, cheap ex-miner FPGAs were on eBay, https://hackaday.com/2020/12/10/a-xilinx-zynq-linux-fpga-boa.... The Zynq (Arm + Xilinx FPGA) dev board is around $200, https://www.avnet.com/americas/products/avnet-boards/avnet-b.... There was an M.2 Xilinx FPGA (PicoEVB) that conveniently fit into a laptop for portable development, but it's not sold anymore. PCIe FPGAs are used for DMA security testing, some of those boards are available, https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech-fpga
It's really too bad that it was locked to NI products and they've kind faded away.
I sometimes like to think of what could have been, if the ability to program FPGAs so easily would have become more popular.
The FPGA turns 40. Where does it go from here? (11.06.2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44246700