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Comment by rcxdude | Hacker News Reader

They enable a bunch of niches (some of which do have a large impact), as opposed to having a few high-volume uses. Basically anything where you really need an ASIC but you don't have the volume to justify an ASIC (and also have the requires large margins for such a product to be viable). Custom RF protocols, the ASIC development process itself, super-low-latency but complex control loops in big motor drives, that kind of thing. You'll almost never see them in consumer products (outside of maybe some super-tiny ones which aren't useful for compute but just do 'glue logic') because they're so expensive.

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What you're describing is correct for the top-end FPGA products (they're in every 5G base station, and almost every data centre has thousands of them rerouting information), but the low-end ($10 or less) 2k LE FPGAs are in a hell of a lot of products now too. They're fantastic for anything where you need a lot of logic that executes immediately/concurrently (vs sequentially as would with a microcontroller) in a tiny package. Think medical devices, robotics, comms devices, instrumentation, or power controllers.

I'm pretty sure there's an FPGA in most consumer devices now, but as you say they're there for some sort of glue logic - but that's a killer niche unto itself. Schematics can shift and change throughout a design cycle, and you only need to rewrite some HDL rather than go hunting for a different ASIC that's fit for purpose. It's a growing field again as their cost has come right down. They're in the Apple Vision headset, the Steam Deck, modern TVs, and a host of small form factor consumer computing products.

> they're in every 5G base station

Just a tiny nitpick to your great answer but Nokia's 5G base station stuff (Reefshark) is built around ASICs. I would expect others do the same. There's some reasoning at https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/artic...

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2020/06/15/noki...

The ReefShark ASIC sits alongside an FPGA which acts akin to an IPU. I know only because I played my own small part in the design. It was originally meant to be entirely FPGA-based, but they got hit with some severe supply constraints by Intel and Xilinx, which is why cost keeps getting discussed. Prices have dropped back down to stable numbers again since mid-last year, but at the time ASICs ended up being more affordable at the volume they're doing (demand spiked mid-project due to the removal of Huawei networking equipment).

We (outside Wireless) heard the Intel silicon didn't perform/yield and the original designs became infeasible, prompting a sudden mad scramble. I didn't realise it was originally planned to be FPGA-based. Interesting, thanks.

Very glad to hear things have improved.

> I'm pretty sure there's an FPGA in most consumer devices now,

I can’t think of the last time I saw an FPGA on a mainstream consumer device. MCUs are so fast and have so much IO that it’s rare to need something like an FPGA. I’ve seen a couple tiny CPLDs, but not a full blown FPGA.

I frequently see FPGAs in test and lab gear, though. Crucial for data capture and processing at high speeds.

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