Things are even more fun on the hardware-ish side. Some FPGA boards load a sort of bootloader circuit from on-board flash which enables a host to reflash the bo

Things are even more fun on the hardware-ish side. Some FPGA boards load a sort of bootloader circuit from on-board flash which enables a host to reflash the board over things like PCIe on power up. What do you call the design that does this? It's not really hardware (though the RTL describes hardware!) and it's not really software (though it is clearly a bootloader!). An even worse one is things like state machines because there's no real technical difference between a state machine which blinks an LED and a massive out-of-order processor; they're both just state machines of different scales. One term that's sort of caught on for FPGA designs is "gateware" but people still argue about it.