Comment by almostgotcaught
5 days ago
There is literally no market for FPGA as coprocessor/accelerator and there never was (that was some kind of pipe/hype dream before GPGPU took off). Where there is a market for them (prototyping ASICs, automotive, whatever, network switches, etc) there is no replacement but there is also no growth.
Depends entirely how you define "growth". If you take AI, LLM as your baseline of growth, then yeah, sure. But what else is growing?
FPGAs are getting cheaper with each gen, expanding into low cost, high volume markets that were unthinkable for an FPGA 10 years ago. Lattice has an FPGA family specifically targeted to smartphones, and I've been consulting for a high end audio company that wanted to do some dsp, and a cheap FPGA was the best option in the market for the particular implementation that they wanted to do.
It's not sexy growth, but it's growth. Otherwise, we wouldn't had the explosion of the latest years in low end FPGA companies.
you can do high end audio dsp on dspic lol.
lookup sigmastudio dsp, dsp is insanely cheap todo, there is absolutely no need for fpga, what that guy was doing was either nonsense or it was in 1995. which are both irrelevant points, or rather you provided examples that show fpga are irrelevant, no growth market.
(how many audio devices were using TMS320 dsps even before and after ipod was a thing...)
My point is that FPGAs have become very cheap, competing with microcontrollers. I would agree that high end audio manufacturers are about as rational as they costumers.
If FPGAs are not a growing market, how come we have gone from 2 companies (we'll ignore niche space stuff) to ~10 in the last 20 years? Not many IC fields where there is a growth in manufacturers instead of consolidation...