Inside the UK FPGA Landscape: Insights from the DESN Industry Survey 2025

Source: Dev.to

Survey Context

The results highlight how UK teams are applying FPGAs across multiple industries, the evolving balance between traditional and advanced verification approaches, and the ongoing need to maintain and develop engineering expertise within small, specialised teams.

Who Took Part and What They Use

Figure 1 illustrates the distribution of FPGA vendors among respondents, with AMD/Xilinx devices clearly leading adoption, followed by Altera. Smaller vendors such as Lattice, Microchip, and Efinix also appear, reflecting the expanding diversity of technology options available to UK designers seeking flexibility and supply resilience. Typical FPGA families included Kintex‑7, Artix‑7, Stratix‑10, and Cyclone, demonstrating a balance between high performance and cost efficiency. This combination illustrates the UK’s continued strength in complex, high‑value but resource‑conscious designs, especially in industrial, aerospace, and research‑driven applications.

AMD/Xilinx remains the dominant platform, with Altera, Lattice, Microchip, and Efinix showing meaningful secondary adoption, underscoring a maturing and diversified FPGA ecosystem.

Project Scale and Engineering Effort

Figure 2 shows that mid‑range FPGA designs (10 k – 500 k LUT‑FF pairs) are by far the most prevalent, while only a few projects exceed the million‑gate threshold. These findings suggest that most FPGA developments remain optimised for smaller teams and faster delivery cycles.

Most projects fall within the 10 k – 500 k LUT‑FF range, confirming that mid‑sized FPGA designs dominate UK development activity. Few respondents report working on 1 M – 5 M‑gate designs, and very large‑scale projects above 5 M gates remain uncommon. This also highlights recurring challenges in verification effort, resource scalability, and toolchain management, particularly for FPGA‑SoC integration and in‑system debug.

Application Areas

Figure 3 highlights the distribution of application sectors, showing aerospace and defence as the leading sector for FPGA use, followed by industrial and prototyping applications. Consumer electronics, scientific instrumentation, and video/image processing also represent strong areas of activity, demonstrating the adaptability of FPGAs across both commercial and research domains.

Aerospace and defence dominate FPGA use, followed by industrial, prototyping, and scientific applications.

Tabulated responses showing the detailed percentage share of each application area: Aerospace & Defence (57.89 %), Prototyping (42.11 %), Industrial (31.58 %), Video & Image Processing (42.11 %).

These findings confirm that FPGAs remain vital for mission‑critical and performance‑intensive systems where reliability, flexibility, and low latency are essential design priorities.

Tools, Languages, and Verification Approaches

Figure 4 presents the usage of design and scripting languages. VHDL remains the most widely used HDL among UK respondents, followed by Verilog, SystemVerilog, and TCL. Python is increasingly used for automation and build scripting, while MATLAB and Perl serve minor roles in analysis and integration.

In terms of verification strategies, simulation with directed tests remains the most common technique (84.21 % of participants). In‑system testing and manual RTL code reviews are also heavily relied upon (68.42 % each). Functional coverage and constrained‑random simulation are gaining traction but remain under 50 %. Assertion‑based verification was reported by 26.32 %, and formal equivalence checking trails behind at 15.79 %.

Figure 5 breaks down verification methods currently in use:

Directed‑test simulation dominates, with in‑system testing and manual RTL reviews used by over two‑thirds of respondents. Coverage‑based, assertion‑based, and formal methods are growing steadily but remain less common.

Prototyping and Design Challenges

Figure 6 (a) shows the most persistent barriers identified by UK respondents. Visibility and debug limitations are the top challenges, closely followed by hardware integration and multi‑FPGA partitioning difficulties.

Designing and building hardware with the latest FPGA devices is the most common challenge, followed by external IP integration and issues with hardware visibility and debug. Partitioning large designs and managing high‑speed inter‑FPGA connections are notable secondary difficulties.

Figure 6 (b) provides a tabulated view of the same data.

Design Flow and Bottlenecks

Figure 7 (a) illustrates the distribution of engineering effort across development phases. Verification dominates total project effort, while design, integration, and debug tasks each contribute meaningful portions of engineering time.

Respondents reported spending the largest share of total effort on RTL verification (28 %) and initial design specification (24 %), followed by RTL entry (15 %). The remaining time is divided among timing analysis, software integration, and in‑lab debug activities.

Figure 7 (b) presents the same information in a tabulated format.

Safety and Standards Compliance

Among respondents engaged in aerospace and safety‑critical system design, the adoption of formal frameworks remains limited but measurable. Figure 8 shows that roughly half of respondents working in safety‑critical environments apply DO‑254 compliance at some level, most commonly Level A, the most rigorous certification category for airborne electronic hardware. Levels B‑D are less common.

Half of UK respondents reported no adherence to formal safety‑critical standards, while those working in regulated domains most frequently applied DO‑254 Level A for aerospace projects.

Figure 9 indicates that only a small number of respondents currently follow IEC 61508 or ISO 26262 processes for industrial and automotive projects, reflecting early adoption of these standards beyond aerospace.