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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

This opinion is unlikely to be popular, and it's been decades since I was a full participant in the hardware business, but...I just have never seen the use case for FPGAs beyond niche prototyping / small run applications, which by definition make no money. I suppose there are also scenarios where you want to keep your design secret from the fab and/or change it every week, but those seem very niche too (NSA, GCHQ, ..?).

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Couple things--

1) You underestimate how critical prototyping has become, again likely since you say it's been a couple decades. Time to market has become more important, and verification has become harder as CPUs have gotten even more complex. FPGAs enable cosimulation and emulation, leading to faster iteration of both design and verification efforts and thus better TTM.

FPGAs are so important in the hardware development process that I would even say you're not a serious hardware company if you don't have any FPGA frameworks to design silicon.

2) As others have mentioned, FPGAs are also critical for low-latency workloads that require constant tweaks-- high frequency trading (ugh...) comes to mind. The need for "constant tweaks" could also be satisfied with just "normal" software, but that has higher latency as opposed to an FPGA, and FPGAs can get some crazy performance if you're willing to pay the price (south of 7 figures).

Overall sure, usage of FPGAs might be niche compared to, idk, Javascript; but it's commonplace/practically essential in hardware.

Whenever discussion of FPGA comes up on HN, someone inevitably points to low latency workflows but nobody ever mentions video capture and play-out boards using FPGAs. Companies like Blackmagic, Elgato, Matrox, etc.

Hardware like this often uses FPGAs because there’s a need for highly parallel processing that is difficult or even impossible to do on a off the shelf CPU, but the volumes are too low to justify a custom ASIC. Being able to fix bugs or add features after shipping is a big bonus too.

It is very likely that the packets of this comment traveled through several FPGAs to get from your computer to my screen. Yes, they are definitely more niche than CPUs. But niche products have really high margins and people willing to pay for them.

FPGAs are already incredibly popular. They're just mostly in things you are unlikely to personally own or know about. You're going to find at minimum one, but probably more FPGAs in things like big routers and other telecom equipment, e.g. cell towers, firewalls, load balancers, enterprise wifi controllers, video conferencing hardware, test equipment like oscilloscopes, sensor buoys, scientific instruments, MRI machines, LIDARs, high end radio equipment, or even just glue logic tying together other components, like in the iphone.

Yes, in addition to that FPGA also appears under the hood of automobiles and electric vehicles.

I am not sure whether you are serious or trolling but I will bite ;-)

FPGA are being used in many type of applications where real-time is necessary and non-recurrent engineering (NRE) cost need to be minimized, for example here [1].

One classic example is that if you poke under the hood of any signal generator like AWGs, you will probably find an FPGA inside. As you probably aware since you in hardware business, AWGs are probably one of most common equipment in any electronic and electrical labs or companies.

[1]https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/fpgas/article/...

For those who are not familiar, AWG stands for Arbitrary Waveform Generator.

Would that be used as part of a synthesizer?

> I just have never seen the use case for FPGAs beyond niche prototyping / small run applications, which by definition make no money.

You are precisely correct. FPGAs are useful when your volume doesn't reach volumes where an ASIC would get amortized.

Networking companies (Cisco, Juniper, etc.) are classically big consumers of FPGAs.

Tektronix seems to make quite a bit of money and there is at least one FPGA in practically every test instrument they make. This holds true for practically all test instrument manufacturers.

I know a LOT of industrial automation and testing companies that generally have FPGAs in their systems. Both for latency and for legacy support (Yeah, GPIB still exists ...).

Yes, they aren't "Arm in a cell phone" type volumes, but that doesn't mean they aren't quite profitable if you can aggregate them.

Easily changing the design and being the cheaper option to ASICs for small productions are the two main uses for FPGAs. You may be designing a box that can be configured to do different things so you may want to support multiple FPGA images to switch back and forth depending on the mission. You may just want to be able to easily upgrade firmware for a complex design in the future. For Space DSP applications, the FPGA is king and will probably be for a long time simply due to the ability to cram a lot of functionality into a small space (DSP, microcontroller, combinational logic circuits, and massive I/O banks all in one chip)

For low volume (sub 100k units?) they're often the only good way to do configurable* SERDES in any environment that is latency sensitive.

Configurable as in one SKU is in several products, but not necessarily reconfigurable by the end user.

Not long ago there was an FPGA inside the iPhone (an ice40). Hardly niche.

Really? What function did it serve the iPhone?

Likely just simple glue logic. Things like converting one protocol into another, doing some multiplexing or some simple pre-processing or filtering on some sensor data. They're incredibly tiny (2x2mm) and use little power, so they pop up in designs pretty regularly.

I wonder if they are reprogrammable, so if what's running on these could ever be updated.

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