While researching contemporary intersections of encryption and databases (for a presentation), I learned about Microsoft's Cipherbase.[1] They made a dbms which uses an FPGA as trusted hardware that will decrypt db fields & perform the appropriate query. In my wild fantasy, I hope to recreate the ASIC for bragging rights.

Talking about ASICs, I'm surprised no one mentioned how the public heard of FPGAs in the last few years: bitcoin mining.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/cipherbase/