[bsder]

Huh? What hardware industry have you been in?

If it's a hot hardware area (past hot areas: graphics chips, microprocessors, WiFi chips, OC-768 networking chips, ...), nobody will wait for the FPGA prototype. You get funding, you go to VLSI and maybe you produce an FPGA board for validation along the way. Probably not since what you're doing is probably too complex for a single FPGA anyway.

Otherwise, your volume is too small and the FPGA IS your product.

And that's only if you can't somehow make it run on a microprocessor.

The only place I've ever seen an FPGA validation board was with RF startups in the cellular space. And, even then, it was way back when the protocols were much simpler.

tl;dr If your demo doesn't run on a microprocessor (or SoC), it doesn't exist.

[jacquesm]

Simply stuff where FPGAs would have been a god-send if they had existed. In fact, we probably could have run mid-sized production runs using FPGAs without the need to go to ASIC, that's nice for consumer stuff where manufacturing cost is the major driver but for specialty hardware targeted at industry the manufacturing cost of an individual unit is much less important than what it does. The margins are such that capability at any cost is acceptable. Provided you can prove that it can be done (hence my earlier comment).