rbanffy parent
I always wonder what happened to CPLDs. Wouldn't it be possible to make them at the same capacities of FPGAs? What would the intrinsic differences be?
CPLDs ran into scaling issues. Routing problems increase exponentially the more logic you add to them. Eventually routing delays make it pointless, not to mention power usage is horrific.
Not many CPLDs were made beyond about 256 macrocells. Even a typical lowend FPGA will be 5k to 50k "macrocells" or some other form of LUT-based logic cell.
As an example, the last time I had to design with a CPLD it was a 128 macrocell part, and had a static power draw of 0.5W, which is kind of ridiculous.
Altera did try to make a sort of hybrid part, the MaxII and MaxV series which are just tiny FPGAs that are flash programmed. Though, if you wanted that, there are plenty of better ones out there like the ice40.