But it surprises me it's not at the top of HN. An incredible video!
Surprised to see so much use of FPGAs and not ASICs for cheaper mass-production of the missiles. I wonder if they went with the FPGAs for secrecy reasons (no need to hand over chip designs) or if they simply wanted the ability to patch bugs in the hardware. For the estimated manufacturing date of 1998, I would have imagined FPGAs were quite a bit more expensive.
Its military procurement, there are no budget constraints. Ukrainian $700 drones taking out russian tanks is what happens when you actually have to count money spend on anti armor weapons.
I'm not sure if there'd be enough volume to justify fabbing and debugging custom silicon. 45,000 missiles have been built over the last 29 years. The newer models probably aren't using the same IR sensors as the ones from 1996, so FPGAs have the advantage being reconfigurable.