Are FPGAs suffering from the innovator's dilemna?

FPGAs constitute a highly profitable industry, with approximately $5 billion of sales per year. High barriers to entry keep most companies away, and enable high profit margins for the incumbents. The industry has grown greatly over the years, but still constitutes a small portion of the overall semiconductor market. This raises the question to be addressed by this panel: is the FPGA community innovating as much as it should, or is a bias to maintain high profit margins and protect the cash flow of the current FPGA market holding us back from exploring new ideas and products that could greatly expand the appeal of and market for FPGA-related technology? This would be a classic case of the innovator's dilemma defined by Clayton Christensen: it is difficult for a company to engage in creative destruction of a cash cow product. Our distinguished panel of experts will discuss whether we are seeing major innovation in architectures, design flows and applications, or only incremental improvements. We will also discuss if any new (possibly low margin) application domain is left out by the FPGA industry, what radical ideas should be explored, and whether large incumbents, new startups, academia or some combination are best able to attack these new areas.