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: -only 2% of the st

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: -only 2% of the standard FPGA fabric does useful work.. & -the really expensive part to develop is the IO (too many standards) 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's fpgas are really structured asics. Very much for an open fpga, but let'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]