Date: 29/04/2012

Achronix packs high-density logic in FPGA by leveraging Intel fab

The world's number one chipmaker Intel is also a semiconductor fab/foundry service provider for some selected fabless chipmakers. One of that is Achronix Semiconductor, a FPGA specialist.
Intel is offering its 22nm facility to fabricate Achronix Semiconductor's Speedster22i HD and HP programmable silicon product families. Achronix claims these devices consume half the power at half the cost of high-end, 28-nm FPGAs.

But the challenge for Achronix here is to provide the level of IP and development support what Xilinx and Altera are providing to its customer and also the extensive customer interaction for SMEs to big organizations.

Xilinx is trying to continue to maintain its lead in this market by offering a FPGA design software called Vivado, as powerful as what the design engineers generally get from EDA software companies. This is tough to replicate by FPGA startups.

The FPGA in China and India is growing faster and bigger, Xilinx, Altera, Lattice and Microsemi have extensive offices in these regions to give best support. Achronix is least present in these markets with no local office as good as other FPGA companies. Lattice gives the best support for the cost sensitive market.

Also its not too far for 28nm customers of Xilinx and Altera to get 20nm FPGA chips, since TSMC is just few months behind in bringing 20nm chips.

Xilinx CEO Moshe Gavrielov once said to this writer, every fabless company is not given the same preference by semiconductor foundry service providers.

With Intel offering fab services, one trend is clear, the fabless business model is growing not falling. You can not waste Billion of $s investment by allowing only a few products to get the benefit of ultra-scaling.