One particular use of FPGAs (and ASICs) is operating on bit-oriented rather than byte-oriented data. Certain kinds of compression and encryption algorithms can

One particular use of FPGAs (and ASICs) is operating on bit-oriented rather than byte-oriented data. Certain kinds of compression and encryption algorithms can be implemented much more efficiently on custom chips. These are generally limited to niche applications, though, because the dominance of byte-oriented general-purpose CPUs and microcontrollers selected against such algorithms for more common applications.