More 'fabless IC billionaires' in 2010, says IC Insights! Is India listening?

Brilliant! There’s no other word to describe the first part of this headline!

As per IC Insights’ forecast of 2010 billion-dollar fabless IC suppliers, excerpted from a ranking of top 50 fabless IC suppliers in its ‘ 2011 edition of The McClean Report’, as many as 13 fabless IC suppliers are tipped to cross the $1-billion mark in sales in 2010! As per IC Insights, this is a significant step up — from 10 companies in 2009 and eight in 2008.

Leading fabless IC suppliers. Source: IC Insight, USA.

Just sit back and admire this table. There are nine firms from the US — Qualcomm, Broadcom, AMD, Marvell, Nvidia, Xilinx, Altera, LSI and Avago, three from Taiwan — MediaTek, Novatek and MStar, while ST-Ericsson is Europe’s lone representation in this stellar list.

In this august club of IC billionaires, no surprises, but Qualcomm retains the top place for the third consecutive year. Broadcom moves up a place. AMD should become the world’s third largest player.

Broadcom at 53 percent, Marvell at 34 percent, Xilinx at 39 percent, Altera at 63 percent, Avago and Novatek at 40 percent each are top performers. However, MStar of Taiwan steals the show with an estimated 75 percent growth in 2010.

Qualcomm, Nvidia and LSI have performed well, especially  the last two – coming pff a difficult 2009. Taiwan’s MediaTek has seen the biggest slip — down to 3 percent in 2010 from 22 percent in 2009.

There is no representation from Japan in the fabless IC billionaires club. IC Insights has indicated that the fabless/foundry hasn’t caught on in Japan and is unlikely to do so in the near future. However, Taiwan and China based firms should sooner or later find their way into this club.

I will now come to India!

FPGA Camp in Bangalore discusses various industry aspects

Today, FPGACentral hosted its first ever FPGA Camp in Bangalore. The conference mainly aimed at bringing the engineers together and discussed the various aspects of the FPGA, mainly next generation FPGA technology, application, methodology, best practices and challenges, etc.

Lattice's Rakesh Agarwal presenting at the FPGA Camp in Bangalore.

The morning session rolled out with a session on ‘Today’s FPGA Ecosystem,’ where the participants included, Neeraj Varma, country manager – Sales, India and Australia/NZ, Xilinx India, Wai Leng Cheong, regional sales manager, South Asia Pacific, Altera Singapore, and Rakesh Agarwal, country manager, India & ANZ, Lattice.

Adrian Hernandez, senior manager, Xilinx USA, gave a presentation on ‘Mastering FPGA Design through Debug.’ This was followed by John Wei, High Speed System Specialist, Altera, Hong Kong delivering a lecture on the ‘Trends and challenges in designing with high speed transceivers based FPGAs, and signal Integrity concerns.’ The morning session was wrapped up by Srinivasan Venkataramanan, CTO, CVC, who presented on ‘Upgrading to SystemVerilog for FPGA Designs.’

A highlight of the afternoon session was a panel discussion on ‘State of FPGA technology and its adoption in India.”

Now, I am not really posting anything specifically on the sessions as these were mainly targeted toward engineers, and I, for a change, decided to simply sit back and listen to the speakers, rather than take notes.

Just a few points from here and there. For instance, Lattice’s Rakesh Agarwal mentioned that the company’s mid-range ECP3 is the lowest power SerDes enable FPGA in the market. The company is focused on markets where it can differentiate with high value, low power solutions, and where it has the scale to effectively compete.

The single most important feature that one must keep in mind when designing and verifying FPGA based projects is device reconfiguration. Xilinx’s Adrian Hernandez suggested that users should build on the FPGA’s reconfiguration. He called upon them to share knowledge and experiences. One of the points raised by John Wei was that advanced oscillator and hybrid CDR enables 25Gbps at the 28nm CMOS process node in FPGAs. SystemVerilog interfaces have quickly found way into new designs, as they are useful for RTL designers and verification engineers. Srinivasan Venkataramanan touched upon the ecsystem around the SV-FPGA, adding that all major EDA vendors support SystemVerilog for design.

On the event itself, Navin Kumar and his team, including the volunteers, deserve a huge round of applause for pulling off this event. It was the first of its kind in India, an open source conference — with free attendance, etc. I believe, more people turned up, than originally expected. The turnout itself was interesting, with a mix of engineers, students and of course, the industry.

There were some minor hiccups regarding the location/venue and the positioning of booths — some of which looked really cramped for space, etc. However, these are minor issues, which the FPGACentral India team is sure to address in its forthcoming events. Well done guys!

Altera intros 28nm Stratix V FPGA family

Altera Corp. has introduced its next-generation 28nm Stratix V FPGA family, said to be the industry’s highest bandwidth FPGA. Offering up to 1.6 Tbps of serial switching capability, Stratix V FPGAs leverage a myriad of new technologies and a leading-edge 28nm process to reduce the cost and power of high-bandwidth applications.

Gangatharan Gopal, country sales manager and office manager for Altera India, announces the Stratix V FPGAs.

Manufactured on TSMC’s 28nm high-performance (HP) process, the Stratix V FPGA family provides up to 1.1 million logic elements (LEs), 53-Mbits embedded memory, 3,680 18×18 multipliers and integrated transceivers operating up to an industry-leading 28 Gbps.

Gangatharan Gopal, country sales manager and office manager for Altera India,  said that the FPGAs are suitable for devices used in next-generation high bandwidth systems. According to Altera, these offer 35 percent higher performance than alternative process options, as well as 30 percent lower total power versus other generations. These also enable the fastest and most power efficient transceivers.

He pointed out that Altera has been delivering innovations from the core to the I/O that provide higher system performance at lower cost and power.

Altera’s 28nm Stratix V FPGAs are said to have broken through the bandwidth barrier. The company is  also said to be dramatically improving the density and I/O performance of the FPGAs, and further strengthening their competitive position versus ASICs and ASSPs.

Altera’s devices incorporate the industry’s highest level of application-targeted hard intellectual property (IP) for increased system integration and performance without the cost and power penalty.

The FPGA family itself includes four variants that address a broad range of applications in the wireless/wireline communications, military, broadcast, computer and storage, test and medical markets. These variants include:

* Stratix V GT FPGA – Industry’s only FPGA with integrated 28-Gbps transceivers targeting 100G systems and beyond.
* Stratix V GX FPGA – Supports a wide range of applications with 600-Mbps to 12.5-Gbps transceivers.
* Stratix V GS FPGA – Optimized for high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) applications with 600-Mbps to 12.5-Gbps transceivers.
* Stratix V E FPGA – Highest density FPGA ideal for ASIC prototyping, emulation or high-performance computing applications.

FPGAs sizzle, thanks to Actel, Altera and Xilinx at Embedded World 2010!

Three major announcements, simultaneously, from Actel, Altera and Xilinx in quick succession, indicates that ‘all is well’ in the FPGA market. And it seems, the Embedded World Conference is playing a major role in all of these developments. Great!

Altera announced an industrial safety data package for automation applications at the Embedded World Exhibition and Conference in Nuremberg, Germany.

Then, Xilinx introduced the Xilinx automotive (XA) family of Spartan-6 field FPGAs optimized for applications requiring high-speed connectivity and high-resolution video performance. At the same conference, Xilinx and Inova Semiconductors introduced an Automotive Pixel Link (APIX) IP solution for the Xilinx automotive (XA) family of FPGAs.

World’s first intelligent mixed signal FPGA
The best one, I believe, has come from Actel. Also at the Embedded World 2010, Actel unveiled SmartFusion, the world’s first intelligent mixed signal FPGA.

Now, isn’t that interesting? There has been a lot of focus on analog/mixed-signal (AMS), and Actel’s SmartFusion could not have been timed better.

I recall a story I had done some time ago with Cosmic Circuits for the India Semiconductor Association’s (ISA) website. The company said that the AMS market in India is set to expand rapidly in the next several years — driven by consumer, communications, automotive and industrial. The variety of analog chips required and the complexity are no different from those needed in other regions of the world!

Why? About 18 months ago, when speaking with Synopsys regarding the Galaxy Custom Designer, I distinctly remember the company telling me that it improves AMS productivity!

As per information, Actel’s SmartFusion devices feature Actel’s proven FPGA fabric, a complete MCU subsystem built around a hard ARM Cortex-M3 processor and programmable analog blocks on a flash process. This means, embedded designers can now easily build the system they want, with all the features they need, on a single chip.

Wonder what’s taken the FPGA suppliers so long to come out with an intelligent mixed signal FPGA. Am sure, the others have things lined up as well!

By the way, I couldn’t find anything from Achronix! Maybe, something is on the way from this company as well!

Altera expands low-cost Cyclone FPGA series

Altera Corp. has introduced the Cyclone IV FPGAs, thereby expanding the success of the low-cost Cyclone series.

The Cyclone IV GX is said to be the lowest cost, lowest power FPGAs with transceivers, and the Cyclone IV E has helped it extend the lead in combining low cost, low power, and high functionality. Simultaneously, Altera also extended its transceiver portfolio leadership.

The Cyclone IV FPGA family offers two variants. Cyclone IV GX devices have up to 150K logic elements (LEs), up to 6.5-Mbits of RAM, up to 360 multipliers, and up to eight integrated 3.125-Gbps transceivers supporting mainstream protocols including Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), SDI, CPRI, V-by-One and Cyclone IV GX has hard IP for PCI Express (PCIe).

According to Jennifer Lo, Senior Marketing Manager, Altera, the company is pushing bandwidth limits in cost-sensitive markets and products — specifically, smartphones, wireless communications, industrial Ethernet, broadcast and 3D displays.

There is said to be a huge demand from Latin America, Asia, etc., specifically in wireless. Altera is providing a low cost, low power solution. Next, the trend is also moving from 2D to 3D displays. In broadcast it is moving to high bandwidth, in order to support HD video.

Easier for designers to debug FPGA designs
With the new Cyclone IV, will it become easier for designers to debug FPGA designs, especially when looking at the hardware and software aspects? Lo said that ease of use has always been a focus for low-end products for Altera.

“To that end, with Cyclone IV FPGA’s, like other Cyclone series, we strive to provide reference designs, design examples, development boards to customers to jump-start their design. With respect to debugging, we don’t see any particular differences between Cyclone IV and previous Cyclone generations.

“However, with more training, both fundamental trainings offered free on-line and more in-depth instructor-led trainings are available to help customers get accustomed with the Altera design methodology and use of our Industry-leading development software,” she added.

Altera had introduced the Cyclone III LS FPGA development kit, as well as shipments of industry’s first FPGAs with integrated 11.3-Gbps transceivers. How are all of these going to help Altera overall, given that Q3 saw a 3 percent increase; and help boost FPGA sales?

Lo added: “FPGAs usually have a longer design cycle (at least a few months before prototyping and another few months till mass production. With the recent few product additions, Altera is in a technology leadership position that we are all very proud of and confident that we will be able to reap the results of in the near future.”