I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Ranjit Manohar of Cornell a few years ago. He was the founder of Achronix, an FPGA startup. He said:<p>-only 2% of the standard FPGA fabric does useful work..<p>&amp;<p>-the really expensive part to develop is the IO (too many standards)<p>Having an open FPGA is a a good start, but it will only be truly useful if the IO and the optimization is brought up to date with modern fpgas. Today&#x27;s fpgas are really structured asics.<p>Very much for an open fpga, but let&#x27;s not underestimate the investments made by fpga companies to get to the current state of the art. Building platforms is very expensive [ref mythical man month]