[Matthias247]

Do FPGAs not already fulfill this purpose very well? I did 3 FPGA projects (custom networking peripheral, some radar related things) during my inversity time using VHDL and really enjoyed them (apart from the slow synthesis time).

Real chips would certainly provide more room, possibilities and performance - but would also take away from the fast turnaround time that FPGAs provide. And given this run only seems to give people a single shot to get the design right - you want to verify it on a FPGA upfront anyway.

[malf]

Is there any situation where you wouldn’t try to verify on an FPGA first?

[FastEatSlow]

If a design includes many analog components then it is effectively required to fab a prototype. Analog simulation is very imperfect, and the analog equivalent of an FPGA, Field-Programmable Analog Array (FPAA), are very limited in resources. [1]

[1] https://www.digikey.co.uk/en/blog/whatever-happened-to-progr...

[throwawaymaths]

Too big to fit on an FPGA that you can afford.

[klyrs]

There are actually cloud FPGA offerings nowadays! They're downright affordable compared to retail price for the monster chips they're sporting.

[Sirened]

You can also do stuff like slicing your design and putting it on multiple FPGAs. Industry has been doing this for ages because there's no way in hell they're going to fit a full SoC on a single FPGA no matter how much money they can throw at that problem.