Parallel processing makes FPGAs excellent for working with measurement systems and edge computing applications that require processing of large amounts of data.

What Is an FPGA? Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are integrated circuits often sold off-the-shelf. They're referred to as 'field programmable' because they provide customers the ability to reconfigure the hardware to meet specific use case requirements after the manufacturing process.

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.

Expensive hardware FPGAs are significantly more expensive than microcontrollers, which can be sourced at a fraction of the cost, regardless of production scale. Since they're application-specific, ASICs are expensive to produce in small quantities but are far more cost-effective than FPGAs in mass production.