Vendor hubs
Every FPGA vendor that matters, described without marketing: what the families are for, what the tools cost, where the sharp edges are, and what moved recently.
AMD (Xilinx)
The largest FPGA vendor by revenue, with the widest range from 28 nm Spartan parts to 6 nm Versal adaptive SoCs, and the Vivado and Vitis tools most engineers meet first.
Altera
The second-largest FPGA vendor, independent again after its years inside Intel, with Quartus Prime, the Nios V soft core and families from MAX 10 up to Agilex 9.
Microchip
Flash-based FPGAs from the former Actel and Microsemi lines, positioned on low power, security and radiation tolerance, with the RISC-V PolarFire SoC and the Libero SoC tools.
Lattice Semiconductor
Small and low-power FPGAs from iCE40 to Avant, with free vendor tools, the Nexus 28 nm FD-SOI platform, and the best open-source toolchain support of any established vendor.
Efinix
A younger vendor with the Quantum routing-rich architecture, low-cost Trion devices on 40 nm, 16 nm Titanium parts with hard RISC-V cores, and a free, lightweight Efinity toolchain.
Gowin Semiconductor
A Chinese vendor whose LittleBee and Arora devices, sold on cheap Sipeed Tang boards, have become the entry point for many beginners, with Gowin EDA and open-source Apicula support.
QuickLogic
A small vendor focused on embedded FPGA IP and ultra-low-power sensor devices, notable for being the first to adopt an open-source toolchain as its official flow.
Achronix
A high-end specialist whose 7 nm Speedster7t devices combine a hard 2D network on chip, GDDR6 and 400G Ethernet for data centre and networking work, plus Speedcore eFPGA IP.
NanoXplore
A French vendor of radiation-hardened SRAM FPGAs, from NG-Medium to the 28 nm FD-SOI NG-Ultra with Cortex-R52 cores, built with ESA and CNES for European space independence.
Renesas (ForgeFPGA)
Tiny ForgeFPGA devices of one to five thousand LUTs, descended from the Silego and Dialog mixed-signal line, sold as a programmable replacement for glue logic at a sub-dollar price point.
Chinese FPGA vendors
An overview of the domestic Chinese FPGA industry beyond Gowin, covering Fudan Micro, Anlogic and Pango Micro, their device families and tools, and the trade context around them.
The open-source ecosystem
The free toolchain of Yosys, nextpnr and openFPGALoader with full support for Lattice iCE40 and ECP5 and Gowin, partial support for others, and the simulators and frameworks around it.