So What the Heck is an FPGA?

What’s an FPGA? An FPGA is a reconfigurable digital logic IC (Integrated Circuit) often used for highly parallelized computing and custom interfaces to bespoke hardware. You’ll usually find them in specialized, lower-volume systems where high throughput or low latency is critical - applications like datacenter, networking, RADAR, aerospace & defense, medical devices, 5G / wireless communications, scientific research, AI accelerators, imaging, and test / measurement instrumentation. What are they good at? FPGAs hit a sweet spot by delivering performance that pure software can’t match, without the up-front cost of an ASIC, all while retaining most of the system flexibility offered by software. FPGAs also offer some unique security features that make them attractive to specific markets. ...

August 11, 2025 · 4 min · David Gussler

Intro Post

Hello World Shrikebyte is a small, independent consulting firm focused on delivering fast FPGA and SoC systems. It consists of one employee ~yours truly~ and one very supportive wife, who this wouldn’t be possible without. I’m David Gussler, an experienced FPGA design engineer, who graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. I’ve worked for the largest of defense contractors, three-person startups, and somewhere in-between at times throughout my career. I love chopping through bureaucracy to get difficult FPGA, embedded programming, and digital signal processing work done, and I knew that I’d be perfectly positioned to help do the same for other companies as an independent contractor. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few key customers encourage me to start doing this full-time, so I took the plunge, and now here we are… ...

July 29, 2025 · 2 min · David Gussler