[gibrown]

This was my experience working on SoCs at Broadcom also where we didn't really use FPGAs at all.

But at another employer that did not work on consumer designs, I did use a lot of large FPGAs in final shipped products, and in those cases we did some of our heavy testing and iterating on the real FPGA(s). For example I built a version of the FPGA with pseudo-random data generation to test an interface with another FPGA. When I found a case that failed I could then reproduce it in simulation much more quickly.

That employer also built some ASIC designs and I remember some discussions about using FPGA prototyping for the ASICs to speed up verification or get a first prototype board built faster that would later get redesigned with the final ASIC. I don't know if they ever went down that route but it would not surprise me if they did. These were $20k PCB boards once fully assembled, and integration of the overall system was often a bigger stumbling block than any single digital design.

There are a lot of different hardware design niches so I'm sure there are many other cases.

All my information is also about 10 years out of date.