Convergence of FPGA and ASIC at nodes of 20nm and 16/14nm

Xilinx has announced taping out of 20nm FPGA chip using TSMC fab. The 20nm FPGA which is named as 'Ultrascale family' by Xilinx is expected to be sampled in late 2013 and mass production in 2014. Xilinx is also in full speed to bring 16nm on the design benches of EEs in 2014. Altera is also going fast in bringing 14nm FPGA made by Intel fab sometime during same time. Two more FPGA vendors who are also in the race whose products worth trying are Achronix and Tabola with 22nm Intel made FPGAs. How do these expensive deep node FPGA chips will help chip/system designers in building better products. Here is a brief write-up on the use of 20nm and 16/14nm FPGA ICs. The ways FPGAs have pushed out ASIC market is history, now they are entering lot more markets/applications by offering programmable silicon advantage. The ASSP/CSSP, SoC and the microcontroller markets are targeted now immediately. When a mobile phone SoC of 28nm is made using 14nm node. The integration helps the SoC chip to fit into a smart wearable device on your wrist replacing your wrist watch. Mobile phone with 14nm SoC with 4x capabilities of 28nm SoC can do more video processing/analytics of the picture taken from the mobile phone camera, and improved voice to text processing. You can also nearly turn your smart-phone/tablet into a PC/TV/phone by wirelessly connecting to display and storage device of any s...