I've recently bought second-hand Xilinx FPGAs on Ebay for $250 each with list price of $3500. They come on boards that have an unidentified manufacturing fault. Salvaging and reusing the chips seems realistic using a budget vapor phase soldering setup (not attempted yet) but the challenge for me is designing or otherwise acquiring suitable PCBs to put them onto. I'm told that you can potentially find suitable PCBs on Aliexpress but I haven't looked into this in detail yet.
In other words, there doesn't seem to be much demand in the secondhand market, and you can potentially use that in your favor to take advantage of supply selling at steep discounts.
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I've recently bought second-hand Xilinx FPGAs on Ebay for $250 each with list price of $3500. They come on boards that have an unidentified manufacturing fault. Salvaging and reusing the chips seems realistic using a budget vapor phase soldering setup (not attempted yet) but the challenge for me is designing or otherwise acquiring suitable PCBs to put them onto. I'm told that you can potentially find suitable PCBs on Aliexpress but I haven't looked into this in detail yet.
In other words, there doesn't seem to be much demand in the secondhand market, and you can potentially use that in your favor to take advantage of supply selling at steep discounts.