I worked in medical diagnostic device design for a while, and there we needed FPGAs because literally nothing else could accept data as fast as we needed. I'm t

I worked in medical diagnostic device design for a while, and there we needed FPGAs because literally nothing else could accept data as fast as we needed. I'm talking GHz speed ADC reading, with special purpose transceivers that are built on-die with FPGAs. The fact that we can both poll data that fast and do any processing of it at all is astonishing. That's where FPGAs are going today -- data acquisition systems for anything fancier than accelerometers.