Worldwide merchant market dollar shipments of structured Asic products are forecast to soar from the $210m reached last year to $2.53bn by 2009.

That is according to market research firm In-Stat, which said that communications will dominate the consumption of structured Asic products. The majority of applications will be in the networking infrastructure, telecoms and mobile basestation segments.

More than four-fifths of all structured Asics will be sold in the Americas markets, with Japan taking the majority of the remainder.

In-Stat divides structured Asic into three categories: embedded array (closest to a cell-based Asic); embedded FPGA in a cell-based design; and reconfigurable CPU. The embedded array will dominate dollar shipments, said In-Stat, but losing ground to the other methods.

The second largest end market for structured Asic will be industrial, which includes medical, factory automation and instrumentation applications.

www.in-stat.com