Ask HN: Why isn't FPGA adoption exploding now that LLMs can write HDL? You can now describe a circuit in plain English and get working Verilog out of an LLM. Agents can iterate on it, run simulations, fix timing issues. The biggest barrier to FPGAs was always that writing HDL sucked and the toolchains were hostile. That barrier is rapidly shrinking. So where is the wave of new FPGA projects? Why aren't hobbyists and startups reaching for FPGAs for stuff that would have been microcontroller or GPU territory before? Cheap dev boards exist, the silicon is there, and now the programming side is getting dramatically easier. What am I missing? Is the toolchain still the bottleneck even if the HDL itself gets easier? Is it a awareness problem? Or do most people just not have problems where FPGAs are the right answer? |