Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA? 1. For one-off designs (quantity=1) ASICs will never beat a high end FPGA on unit price. 2. As a hobbyist, you want to EXPERIMENT. You cannot do that with an ASIC. Hobbyists want to do something simple, test it on real hardware, and slowly build up from that. I don't have the time nor expertise nor motivation to spend months writing…
> Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA? No. I said the low-end of FPGA sales is getting eaten by microcontrollers and the high-end of FPGAs sales is probably about to get eaten by custom ASICs. Although the cost of making an ASIC is high, in the larger nodes it's not that high, and getting ever cheaper at FPGA performance levels and logic densities. FPGAs are terribly i…
FPGA unit costs keep doing down and they usually tend to use a recent manufacturing process. Meanwhile the fixed NRE costs of ASICs keep going up the more advanced the manufacturing process is.
An FPGA consists of non programmable logic components such as DSPs, block RAM, NoCs, SERDES/configurable IO, that keep scaling with the manufacturing process.
If you try to replicate this with an older process to cut costs, you will have an area and energy efficiency penalty.
This means that FPGAs have become more relevant over time.