Electronica 2008 - Read our full show coverage from Munich
Actel has run its flash-based FPGA business up to a $60m a year run-rate and believes it has reached a tipping point where it can start to significantly erode SRAM-based FPGA volumes.
"We believe we're at a turning point in flash vs SRAM', Rich Kapusta, vp marketing and business development at Actel, told Electronics Weekly on the company's Electronica stand.
A recent survey, pointed out Kapusta, forecasts that flash-based FPGA will be the fastest growing segment of the programmable logic market. So far, Actel is the only company to make flash-based FPGAs.
One reason is the low-power of flash-based FPGA which seems to be the name of the game at the moment.
The other reason is the smaller cell size of flash. Six transistor SRAM cells are both power hungry and large compared to single transistor flash cells.
Kapusta pointed out that Actel can put 10,000 gates in a 3mm x 3mm package using 130nm process geometry. Next year the company plans to migrate its flash-based FPGAs to UMC's 65nm process.
Already, on the 130nm product family, Actel has over 50 variants selling for less than $. When migrated to 65nm, they should cost considerably less, and power will reduce from the 2 microwatts which they draw at 130nm.
Another boost for flash-based FPGA is the addition of a programmable analogue fabric onto an FPGA with an embedded CPU. Called Fusion, Actel is finding it used for system management in a variety of applications.
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