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I don't know much 'bout the wider world, but FPGAs are hot right now in atomic physics and quantum computing, e.g.

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109...

results which were only really possible when those labs started switching to FPGAs from the DACs they'd been using previously.

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Is "DACs" a typo for "DSPs"? If you really do mean DACs, can you elaborate on what those DACs were doing and how that was replaced by FPGAs?

The experiments use independent time-varying voltages on a set of electrodes to move a trapping potential well (and the ion in contains) along a path.

They need high-quality voltage waveforms on those electrodes to make sure they don't lose the ion or disturb its quantum state, and the DACs they had in '10 didn't have the update rates of the FPGA apparatus they built in '12 and they improved transport times by something like a factor of 100 by making the switch.

I looked at Bowler's thesis. The DAC chips set the performance, the FPGA is just a natural way of interfacing to them.

http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/grp10/upload/Bowler15_thesis-...

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