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

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.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are semiconductor devices that are based around a matrix of configurable logic blocks (CLBs) connected via programmable interconnects. FPGAs can be reprogrammed to desired application or functionality requirements after manufacturing.