> often, what I actually need is just a little bit of weird logic that's asynchronous

As a concrete example of this: two weeks ago I wanted a 21-input OR gate. It would have been wonderful if I could spend a little bit of money, buy a programmable thing in a 24-pin package, put it down, figure out some way to get the bitstream in (this is never pleasant in medium-volume manufacturing, so it's not like we're going to solve it now), and get my gate function that is literally one line of HDL. One. Line.

As it was, a 21-input OR gate is so much work in 74-series logic that I abandoned that whole thing and we did the bigger-picture job in a different, worse, way.

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tverbeure 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The device that you were looking was not an FPGA but a GAL22V10L.

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exmadscientist 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No, it wasn't. Those are mostly available in PLCC and DIP packages and even if you can get the SOIC/TSSOP versions they still cost $1.20 each at 10k volume. That's flat-out unacceptable for 99% of the things I do. The entire rest of the board I was talking about was $4.60. Processor included. $1.20 is not going to fly.

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tverbeure 2 hours ago | parent [-]

“Reduces use case and requirements to something impossibly niche and low volume then yells at the clouds.”

Anyway, just tie the output of 21 emitter followers together, add a resistor and - tadaaa - 21 input OR!

	▲	exmadscientist an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Hey, that was my problem from last week. And, yes, I agree with you -- it was best solved another way. But please don't complain when I give concrete examples of things I'd like to do but couldn't. (And please do recognize that there was a lot more context to the mess than just "I need an OR gate", but no one cares about the real gory details.)