FPGAs have been used in the industry for decades, basically every time you need high throughput and/or very low latencies and you don't have the volume to justify making an ASIC then FPGAs and CPLDs are the way to go.

The article is not really talking about that though, it's more about having FPGAs in mainstream desktop computers. This is still far from a reality, even if Intel seems to be pushing for it.

I mean, I know, I've professionally written HDL for FPGAs.

My point is that back then (a decade or so ago and farther back) it was relegated to low volume, high margin products, explicitly as a replacement for an ASIC. This was due to the cost of the FPGAs.

The point of this article is that by embracing the reprogrammable nature, they'll make their way into places that in fact have the volumes required for an ASIC (which might not be nearly as big as you might think), but choose an FPGA anyway in order to reconfigure out in the field. We are starting to see this and I'm seeing fairly cheap consumer electronics positions (ie. products in the range of a hundred or so dollars) asking for HDL experience more and more in my area.

Desktops aren't the only mass platform out there.

Keep in mind ASIC fabrication and tool prices are way down compared to 10 years ago so "cheaper than an ASIC" is a moving target too.

Maybe the only one market segment where FPGAs aren't in wide use yet is desktop computers. iPhone 7 has iCE5LP4K inside, AWS provide FPGA-based instances, and Microsoft have even FPGA-powered NICs. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/08/azure_fpga_nics/

Most desktop and server motherboards embed small CPLDs and FPGAs for low-level stuff, like power sequencing.

This has been something FPGA fans have been pushing since I left college with my BsEE 30 years ago.

I'm interested in seeing some examples of their use in consumer electronics. I think this article would be a lot more compelling if it had a section on "You've already bought one if you have a (hypothetically) Roomba vaccum/ Tesla Model S/ Thinkpad laptop/ Ubiquiti router." I'm pretty sure most of those don't have FPGAs, but would be curious to see a list of things which do. I am by no means a representative consumer, but I know there's an FPGA in my:

- Rigol oscilloscope

- National Instruments DAQ equipment

- Mecco laser cutter

- DJI drone

Any others where I might not have taken it apart and seen the big QFP with "Xilinx" or "Altera" on the circuit board would be interesting!

The iPhone 7 has a iCE5LP4K. Those little CPLDs (which are full FPGAs these days, but fighting that terminology seems to be a losing battle) are in everything. Which is fair, they're fantastic power sequencing controllers and great for coalescing I2C and SPI buses into something more easily consumed by the application processor. Think an FPGA that constantly polls sensors, wrapping their chip specific format in a way that let's them filter on the CPLD and only wake up the application processor when something interesting happens.

FPGAs are starting to see extensive use in the high end audio market for implementing custom filtering, DSP, and discrete DAC mapping algorithms.

Here's an interview with Rob Watts, a DAC designer who's getting the best measurements in the industry right now with his Chord DAC's (specifically Chord DAVE) http://www.the-ear.net/how-to/rob-watts-chord-mojo-tech

I think they're more common than you think

The Model S has at least one FPGA, as do some of Ubiquiti's products. I don't know about the Thinkpad, but Apple has used cheap Lattice FPGAs for interfacing between different hardware components. Macbook Pros have used them in the past (IIRC for driving the display and interfacing with the battery), as have iPhones.

I was surprised to learn that Roland's JP-08 synthesizer uses an FPGA to simulate an analog synth.

https://youtu.be/zIFLdka9kTM?t=7m34s

Digital audio, DACs in particular. From high-end dCS and Chord down to cheap (but fairly widely known and highly regarded) Singxer USB-I2S converters.

There are FPGAs in both vive headset and wands