Quicklogic, the antifuse FPGA company, is moving away from being a supplier of generic programmable arrays to being more of a supplier of ‘virtual-ASSPs’.
“We’re like a very quick custom turn-round house without the NRE, and without the foundry cost,” Brian Faith, senior director of marketing at Quicklogic, told Electronics Weekly. “From the customer’s point of view we’re an Asic and ASSP replacement business, rather than a supplier of DIY FPGAs. Some of our customers don’t even download our development tools.”
Quicklogic’s technical strategy has been to optimise its anti-fuse technology for low power applications, and target the products at handheld and portable applications, where SRAM-based and flash-based FPGAs are ruled out because of their heavy power requirement.
“Our chips have the power requirement of CPLD with the capabilities of FPGA,” said Faith.
Examples of the sorts of virtual-ASSPs being sold by Quicklogic are a chip which integrates CE-ATA and SDIO host controllers for Marvell’s PXA3xx application processors for connectivity to wireless and storage applications, and a TV-Out solution with XY swap capability.
Quicklogic said that the virtual-ASSP side of the business is growing much faster than the generic FPGA side but declined to give numbers.
However, at market leader Xilinx, a similar strategy has led to the virtual-ASSP side of the business already taking 40 per cent of total sales. “Three or four years ago that was pretty much zero,” according to Wim Roelandts, CEO of Xilinx.
The virtual-Asic approach fits well with Quicklogic’s antifuse technology which is not, of course, reprogrammable.
On the generic array side of its business, Quicklogic is bringing out, in mid-2007, a 600,000 system gates chip, and a 1 million system gates chip, selling for $15 and $20 respectively.