It's so criminal and just rank ass terrible for this amazing segment of computing that it is - by and large - locked up behind incredibly hard to negotiate expensive software packages and solutions.
This is totally the gateway to seeing & understanding what computing actually is. And there are outstanding and fantastic chips with all kinds of capability on offer.
But almost universally they require very expensive obtuse custom/proprietary software to do anything at all. And two thirds the features on the chip require expensive IP add-ons to use from there.
It's just so so so unfortunate what a ceiling there is on adoption for fpgas. So much capability and so little ability for an empoweredearned community to form around such amazing power. There's something deeply scary to me especially about how, with fpga and RISC-V chip design in general, digital logic is cheap and plentiful, but as soon as you want interconnect or memory or io, as soon as you are looking beyond the scope of what you can do inside the scope of a chip, it's $$$ galore to buy ways to talk to the outside world, that open chip design & progress is strong but only in the confines of the digital domain.
I remember my college gf was really interested in FPGAs and was always talking to profs and their colleagues to get access to their tech stacks to play around, just to learn. I think she eventually got a job at a networking company like Cisco or other so hopefully got full time access.
The reason it's like this (and I agree it sucks) is that this kind of software is quite complex to develop and the likely userbase is very small. If you're a hobbyist or even a professional engineer and your goal is to make a specific thing to accomplish a task, rather than use a specific technology, well over 99% of the projects you can think of doing will be much better served by a commodity microprocessor than an FPGA. And cheap MCUs are getting faster every day, so certain things that might have needed an FPGA in the past can make do with programmable microcontroller I/O and maybe an affordable DSP chip today.
This is totally the gateway to seeing & understanding what computing actually is. And there are outstanding and fantastic chips with all kinds of capability on offer.
But almost universally they require very expensive obtuse custom/proprietary software to do anything at all. And two thirds the features on the chip require expensive IP add-ons to use from there.
It's just so so so unfortunate what a ceiling there is on adoption for fpgas. So much capability and so little ability for an empoweredearned community to form around such amazing power. There's something deeply scary to me especially about how, with fpga and RISC-V chip design in general, digital logic is cheap and plentiful, but as soon as you want interconnect or memory or io, as soon as you are looking beyond the scope of what you can do inside the scope of a chip, it's $$$ galore to buy ways to talk to the outside world, that open chip design & progress is strong but only in the confines of the digital domain.