[chclau]

Following Altera acquisition by Intel, and Xilinx acquisition by AMD, perspectives for many FPGA designers were gloom. There was a general feeling that the two biggies would go to a road where the FPGA is only and add-on or coprocessor for CPU workhorses, for applications like Data centers and ML acceleration.

Well, according to these news from Intel, that's not the case. Intle announces new mid-level FPGAs and even new FPGA to compete with Xilinx RFSoCs

[FullyFunctional]

I share(d) that concern. Mitigating this is that a lot of (low to mid range) alternatives seems to have gotten steam: Lattice Semi, Efinix, Gowin, and more that I forget at the moment. I'm rooting strongly for the underdogs to become viable alternatives to the current duopoly.

It would of course have been preferable for any of them to directly support the open stack (yosys, nextpnr, and the various bitstream generators); Lattice's ECP5 is nice, but not very fast.

[varispeed]

My particular worry was that AMD would cancel Xilinx's CPLD chips, but so far it does not look like it. They are very very useful if you want to replace old 74xxx circuits and greatly simplify development.