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You can't really slap an AT motherboard in an LED light bulb and call it a day. Fabs produce all manner of chips, not just GPUs and CPUs.

Over the last 40 years all manner of circuits composed of discrete components have been replaced with chips. Voltage regulation is a chip, battery protection is a chip, rectification is a chip.



Good point. What about repurposing FPGAs?


Barely anyone uses FPGAs. They are pretty much only in use in highly specialized enterprise-grade hardware. Think a €5000 SSL accelerator.


For many FPGAs, the cost of the additional power supply controllers will be more than the cost of a full microcontroller solution.


Not all Chips are digital logic. In fact most are not. An FPGA is reprogrammable logic. You can not replace a rectifier or regulator with an FPGA.

That's kind of like suggesting someone use a stapler (not a staple) when they need a lag bolt because "well they're both steel".




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