It&#x27;s not going to happen. I lost my article that clearly explains it but let me summarize. <i>Every company</i> that tried to challenge FPGA&#x27;s or the Big Two went bankrupt or were acquired. The survivors are niche players who might be acquired or go bankrupt at some point. Another one, Tabula, just announced they&#x27;d be shutting down. This is an insanely tough market to get into and stay in.<p>The article explained the reasons were two: I.P. and tooling. Short version for I.P. is there&#x27;s all kinds of stuff integrated with FPGA&#x27;s on many nodes efficiently and you&#x27;ll always have less due to less cash. Far as tooling, vast majority of Big Two&#x27;s expenses are on R&amp;D for EDA tools like HLS and logic synthesis. That&#x27;s the hard part that took them a decade or more to get working enough to be usable as an ASIC alternative or easier to pick up for new HW engineers. You can&#x27;t just duplicate FPGA HW: you need EDA tools to map hardware designs efficiently and correctly to that HW.<p>The I.P. problem is tolerable but the EDA problem isn&#x27;t. There are academic tools to draw on and Mentor even has an FPGA tool that can be re-targeted. Yet, Xilinx and Altera give away most of their tooling free with best stuff dirt cheap compared to six digit EDA tools. The new contender must have FPGA, onboard I.P., and EDA tool that&#x27;s just as effective despite lacking years &amp; hundreds of millions in R&amp;D. Just ain&#x27;t happening. So, the focus has to be on niches Xilinx and Altera haven&#x27;t conquered yet.<p>Now, I do have several business models I&#x27;m tweaking that might allow for a new, OSS FPGA and toolchain with both non-profit and commercial strategies. But you basically need big players individually or in combination willing to loose millions each year to support R&amp;D on it. There&#x27;s also a few firms that short-cut developments whose tools would help a lot. The effort could acquire them. So, there&#x27;s possibilities but it will be a niche, unprofitable market regardless.