FPGA vs. ASIC and FPGA trends

This semicon blog is a continuation of the recent discussion I had with Vincent Ratford, Senior Vice President, Solutions Development Group, Xilinx.

FPGAs vs. ASICs
Traditionally, there has always been a classic debate: FPGAs vs. ASICs! To find out more on the current status of this ever going discussion, I asked Ratford for his thoughts on this topic.

He said: “To answer this you have to take a long term view and look forward five years to what a 22nm device might look like and the cost to develop it. ASIC starts have declined over the last five years and continue to decline with ASSPs taking their place. For ASSPs to continue, they have to amortize the development cost across multiple customers, but with $50M development costs climbing to $100M, the number of applications that can support this is shrinking.

“FPGAs now look like SoCs with embedded processors, signal processing, multi-gigabit transceivers and a broad portfolio of IPs available from Xilinx or third parties. With shorter design cycles and increasing need to differentiate or die, we believe the world is increasingly turning to programmable devices.

“The investments we [Xilinx] are making in IP and software to enable more complex systems to be designed will carry our silicon platform forward and enable growth. Our challenges, going forward, are reducing power, providing more capability at a lower cost and simplifying the programming. As we make progress on all these fronts, we will take share from the ASIC/ASSP providers.”

Global FPGA industry trends
Given the current semiconductor scenario, there is a need to estimate the global FPGA industry. According to iSuppli, the programmable logic market was $3.6 billion in CY2007. Xilinx revenues were $1.841 billion.

Given the wobble in the current global semicon scenario, where is the FPGA industry headed? Ratford said that Xilinx is forecasting 5-9 percent growth in FY09, which started in April 2008.

He added: “Our most recent quarter ending June was a record quarter for the company at $488 million, with 4 percent sequential growth. Our customers’ design cycles are 12-18 months, so that tends to delay any weakness. However, design activity has been and still is strong. Our customers are highly diversified with over 20,000 across all the vertical markets. We see strong growth in ISM, automotive, aerospace and defense, and slow growth in telecommunications, which is our largest market at ~46 percent of sales.”

According to him, wireless telecom, which constitutes about 40 percent of Xilinx’s telecom revenue, is starting to go through a round of infrastructure buildouts with LTE and TD-SCDMA. This occurs about every five years.

“As these start to deploy, we expect to see some growth beyond what we are currently seeing. Finally, customers do a lot of prototyping with our platforms. We see no significant slowdown at this time,” he noted.

Taking on Altera
Altera recently released the Stratix IV FPGA and HardCopy ASICs. It would be interesting to find out whether Xilinx has released anything that is close to or better than the Altera Stratix IV FPGA or the HardCopy ASIC.

Xilinx’s Ratford said: “Our Virtex-5 products on 65nm have been shipping for 18 months, growing quickly and gaining market share vs. Stratix-3, which is also on 65nm. Since Altera has had difficulty executing on 65nm as far as Stratix III is concerned, they’ve had to jump to 45/40nm and recently pre-announced Stratix IV. Altera is saying they will ship first samples by December, however it takes quite some time to ramp to volume on a node and to put in place all the software and IP required.

“Our 45/40nm design has been underway for some time and we’ll be in the market with a complete solution at the same time as Altera. What matters is when you ramp to production and when you have critical mass of IP so customers can start designs. We have a much larger IP portolio. Customer design activity on high-end FPGA will remain on 65nm devices for sometime to come. We estimate that Xilinx has about a 97 percent market-share in the high-end with our Virtex-5 family.

Alternative to HardCopy
Apparently, Xilinx also has an alternative to Altera’s HardCopy. Ratford pointed to Xilinx’s EasyPath, which provides similar cost reduction path for customers.

“Our approach doesn’t require design compromises like that of HardCopy. Altera’s most recent quarter showed HardCopy revenue down 2 percent to about $10M/quarter. It’s insignificant!”

The last part of this discussion continues later this week! Watch this space, dear readers.

India is Xilinx's most active region for design activity!

Xilinx has been a global leader in programmable logic solutions with over 51 percent market share during 2007, according to iSuppli. PLDs represent an exciting growth potential in the chip market thanks to their flexible nature and ability to change functionality even after being manufactured.

I caught up with Vincent Ratford, Senior Vice President, Solutions Development Group, Xilinx, to find out more about the company’s role in India. Firstly, Xilinx clearly sees India and Asia/Pac as a high growth area for its business.

Ratford said: “India itself has a lot of design activity with many of our customers working with design services and IP companies there. For that reason, we have invested in a large engineering team (125 people and grew last year at 60 percent) working on IP, software, system applications and IC design. These teams augment global development teams around the world with some teams having product responsibility.”

As a company, Xilinx tracks design activity and production, and India is its most active region for design activity. It is also investing a lot in university programs.

He added: “We have significant market share in India vs. the other FPGA vendors. We expect this to continue. We are investing heavily in our Xilinx University Program providing tool, board, training for professors and setting up FPGA, embedded and DSP curriculums. We have a strong technical team supporting customers locally either directly or alongside of our distribution partners.”

So how does Xilinx view the strength of the Indian embedded design segment? Ratford referred to EETimes, which conducts a survey annually on embedded processing. The most recent data showed only about 1/3 of the embedded users using FPGAs, but over 50 percent of them were considering.

He said: “I think we have just scratched the surface on our embedded opportunity. We have over 10k licensed embedded users worldwide, with the smallest percentage in Asia/Pac, but it’s growing rapidly.

“We think there is a lot of unlicensed, and therefore, untracked useage. Going forward, we will be able to track adoption more closely. We are now starting to track useage with our WebTalk tool and have found that about half of the designs using our latest 10.1 release have processors on them. Finally, when we conduct seminars and workshops worldwide, our embedded sessions are the most heavily attended.”

On the role that Xilinx would be playing in India, he said: “Today, we have a strong offering in soft and hard processors for our Virtex and Spartan series FPGAs. We are investing in training and providing development kits to expand the number of embedded developers who can support our platforms.

“We have been developing embedded peripherals, device drivers and are now starting to develop embedded tools there. We expect to expand this. So it’s market development, product development and enabling our ecosystem partners to build on top of our platforms. We are investing in India faster than any other region and plan to leverage our development team there.”