FPGA Engineer Career Path: Service vs Product Companies and Long-Term Industry Outlook

Hello,
My self Avinash. I have 6 years of experience in FPGA domain. I am working in service industry for last 6 years and worked on in house and off shore assignment.My understand of service industry is they are depend on market(product companies) need,they do not have there own road map(project/product ownership)  where as product companies have there own road map. Looking forward to career i want to know as a fpga engineer services or product companies good for career and what is future of fpga engineer in long run as i can see in some years software programmers going to do jobs what front end fpga design engineering doing today due level abstraction fpga vendors providing today.Thanks.

Avinash,

I think that there will continue to be a need for FPGA engineers although you would be wise to learn the tools needed to operate at the higher abstraction level.

Now that you have some experience, it might be wise to look at working for a product company because it will allow you to work your way up to a position of helping define the road map. but the real keyis to get a position where you can learn and use the higher level tools.

I agree with Elizabeth. There is currently a demand for hardware designers who understand what FPGAs are and how to design them. I think this demand will continue for many years, but I also think that it would be valuable to gain experience with higher levels of abstraction like the Xilinx HLS (High-Level Synthesis) tool.

There are are also tools like the Xilinx SDSoC that "sits on top of HLS" -- this allows you to program in C and then run your design on the processor core(s) in their Zynq devices, profile the design, and select which functions need to be hardware accelerated. Theoretically, these tools can be used by software developers; in practice, having a hardware background helps

Hi Avinash,
I agree with Elizabeth and Max. I don't think programmers will replace FPGA designers because they need to have different understandings of what they're doing, just like graphics programmers will not replace embedded systems programmers even though they may use similar skills. I believe that FPGA designers' tools will continue to look more and more similar to programming tools. In my experience, it's best to understand how the hardware works on every level including the logic level and transistor level, as Max suggests. This gives you an advantage over other FPGA designers and can help you solve the more difficult problems. The more you understand, the more you will be in demand from customers.Good luck with your career.
-Bob