About

What we do

The FPGA Professional Association is a volunteer-run organization for FPGA engineers. We publish vendor-neutral career resources, build open-source tools that address daily frustrations in the FPGA development workflow, and provide a place for working engineers to coordinate on what the field needs next.

Who this is for

This site is written for FPGA engineers at all career stages. That includes RTL and verification engineers, hardware security researchers, students entering the field, and hiring managers who need realistic salary data. If your work involves writing or reviewing HDL, integrating IP cores, debugging timing closure, or setting compensation for engineers who do that work, the association is for you.

How we operate

The association is volunteer-driven. No paid staff. No venture funding. No corporate ownership. Decisions are made transparently in public repositories — proposals open as issues, discussion happens in pull requests, and the maintainer of each project has final say in their domain. Code and content are open source under permissive licenses. Sponsorship that would compromise editorial independence is declined; sponsorship that funds infrastructure (hosting, domain, build minutes) and carries no editorial conditions is acceptable and disclosed.

What we are not

• Not a certification body. We do not issue credentials.
• Not a vendor partner. We do not promote or favor specific vendor toolchains.
• Not a recruiting agency. We do not sell candidates or job leads to employers.
• Not a lobbying organization. We do not employ government affairs staff.
• Not a paywalled content site. Everything we publish is free to read.

Origin

The association was started by working FPGA engineers because no existing organization addressed the day-to-day issues of the field — the workforce gap, the gap between vendor tool quality and what teams actually need, and the absence of vendor-neutral career data. Existing professional bodies cover adjacent areas: the IEEE for the broader electronics industry, ACM for software, the SEMI workforce program for the manufacturing pipeline. None focus on the working life of an FPGA engineer in 2026. The association exists to close that gap.

Contact

Email contact@fpgapa.org for sponsorship questions, press inquiries, volunteer interest, or any feedback. The address forwards to a real maintainer; replies usually arrive within a few days.