Are FPGA's getting too complex?

Hi,

in my opinion this is the "old question" of selling high-end with margins (but less devices) or the "butter and bread" types that are cheap enough to be used in many applications with less margin (but a lot of units). You need to have high-end solutions otherwise you are not recognized as an innovative company, but if all companies are only innovative, this leaves the normal users "lost in space".

I also do not know, if these devices with hardcore processors are really well named "FPGA"; Long years ago there were already some companies which were combining stuff on a chip and these units were called "System on chip".

Working with FPGA since 20 years I started with the FLEX 8K devices and every new Generation offered more logic at lower costs, targeting more and more a lot of applications which "had less money" to spend on the Hardware, sometimes even replacing DSP implementations as the FPGA offered a lot more flexibility. This "offer cheap powerful FPGAs for empowering a lot of applications" seems to be replaced partially by the intention to provide the highest integration at highest speed and highest performance.

For many applications the Stratix, Arria, ... were never an Option; if the trend of FPGAs is towards these devices, the FPGA Integration into cost sensitive applications will shrink (leaving either space for other devices or ?)