FPGAs are bare metal; rather than rely on software, they run directly on the hardware. With high bandwidth and the ability to parallel process, they are well-suited to tasks where speed is essential, such as Artificial Intelligence, cryptography, compression, video, audio, and more.

The big barrier is that the FPGA design tools from the FPGA companies are full of bugs that you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to work around. Some open source tools like Yosys have emerged. So far they're limited to the ICE-40 FPGAs from Lattice and a few older Xilinx parts.

FPGAs are powerful design elements in embedded systems with many design advantages, but these devices can have complex designs with complex design issues that need to be debugged. Tracking down design issues such as definition errors, system interaction problems, and system timing errors can be a challenge.

A program on an FPGA pieces together lower-level elements like logic gates and memory blocks, which work in concert to complete a task. Because you're manipulating the hardware from the ground up, FPGAs allow a great deal of flexibility.