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Recently I started to experiment with FPGAs and while doing this I found out about ASICs.
Can anyone explain me the main differences between them.
From what I have read so far, I understand the following:
- FPGA can be reprogrammed, while ASIC can not (so sometimes people are testing the idea on FPGA and then move to ASIC)
- the cost of one FPGA is lower than ASIC, but the cost of many ASICs is lower than many FPGA
There is a question raised here, but 2 answers there are actually from bitcoin prospective (which is not surprising, given that this is bitcoin-related site). I am more interested in a common answer.
Does anyone has a better way to explain the difference?
P.S. I know that the tag I am using is not really relevant, but because there are no tags ASIC, FPGA, there is the best I was able to find
3I think you've already identified the major difference. – Brad Patton – 2013-04-18T13:31:33.780
The major thing I've noticed is that you'll see ASICS in things like networking equipment and small consumer devices while FPGA's are a lot more flexible and allow you to tinker more with them, geared more towards curious people and engineers. Not really much different than what you have above really. – jmreicha – 2013-04-18T13:50:45.677