Date: 28/02/2011

At 28nm, FPGA designs find exponential increase of applications

With the FPGA market grown by 30% to reach US$ 4 billion in 2010, FPGA business is rocking. The beauty of programmable semiconductor chip industry is the range of applications it can address. At 28nm, it touches nearly every market except the likes of PC and mobile phones. FPGA is already a hit in the high-end market, where role of FPGA is increasingly finding importance due to the design flexibility FPGAs offer. Due to fall in cost of FPGA and also power consumption to some extent, FPGA is increasingly finding importance in many medium and low-end custom electronic design applications.
Communication, wireless, Defense/aerospace, medical are the top applications areas for FPGAs. In consumer domain, 3D and HD content is finding FPGA useful.

Moshe Gavrielov, president and chief executive officer, Xilinx, during his keynote speech at India Semiconductor Association's Vision Summit 2011 has presented in-detail the areas of applications FPGAs can address. And also he shared the trends in FPGA in past 20 years, how they started emerging from simple glue logic stuff to a multi-core processor capability. The high volume is the only area FPGA falls back compared to ASIC. The power consumption is still issue for portable handheld electronic applications.
But if the volumes are less than a million and design is prone to regular changes which also require lot of processors with high speed transceivers, FPGAs are made for that.



When this writer asked Moshe Gavrielov on what stopping FPGA vendors from integrating analog into FPGA, he said they can do but getting high performance out of that analog is challenging, so they prefer to leave that market to precision analog semiconductor vendors.

ASICs and ASSPs continue to lead in very high volume market where FPGA is not economical. But Moshe feels in next few years, FPGA will be four times faster than ASIC, it will be two times faster than ASSPs.

On India, Moshe sees lot of strength in Indian electronics industry in system design.

On the question of FPGA companies competing with EDA software companies in providing VLSI design software, Moshe says FPGA companies do not want to compete with EDA companies but they have to provide the required software for FPGA programming, if EDA companies fail to do that. He sees it's an opportunity for EDA software companies.