Interesting article about QuickLogic transitioning to open source. So it seems the goal with open source is not capturing a greater % of the market, but rather growing the market such that there is so much more opportunity for all.
The Programmable Logic (FPGA/eFPGA) market is multi-billion dollars in size and expected to grow at a moderate pace of >7% per year over the coming five years. Another subset of the semiconductor market is the open source RISC-V IP, software and tools market – predicted to grow at nearly 7X that of the FPGA Market. That begs the question… “Why is an open source standard creating such a large market so quickly?”
For reference, there were approximately 70,000 computer hardware engineers in the USA in 2016, anticipated to grow at 5.4% for the following ten years. On the other hand, there were over 800,000 software engineers in the USA in 2016, anticipated to grow by over 30% in the same period. That means there are more than 10X the number of software engineers than computer hardware engineers. The obvious question becomes, “how can we make hardware (FPGAs) more like software?”