Moshe Gavrielov joined Xilinx as CEO in January. He talks to Electronics Weekly about the challenges facing the FPGA supplier as it moves from pure vanilla to SoC.

With your background in the Asic and design software markets you have taken a fresh look at the FPGA market and I believe you have concluded that programmable technology has not lived up to its potential. Is this still your view?

All markets show common themes - the importance of time-too-market, tight R&D budgets and increasing complexity. I hear customers still telling me that their end markets are very fickle and it is hard to determine what their customers really want. So I conclude that programmable logic should be going gang-busters. But it isn't. The market was generally flat in 2007 and looking ahead I see annual growth of between 5 and 9%.

So what needs to change?

The programmable world is going through a transition. In some respects it is similar to the move from the gate array to standard cell in the Asic market. This means the traditional vanilla FPGA is changing in to a market driven product and this is not a trivial change.

Do you have the right technologies for this 'new world' of application specific FPGAs?

In some respects it requires more than what we have. There are two aspects to the change we are going through; a move to a platform approach and a greater focus on power.    

To look at the FPGA platform first; we are adding an ever higher hard-wired element into the programmable architecture. The move from 4th and 5th generations of Virtex showed big changes.

At the high end, products are increasingly defined by the processor architecture. But to do this without taking away design flexibility for our wider customer base, this is the problem we are trying to address. I believe we can continue to support the wider customer base. We have the IP. 

On the power side, I see opportunities to increase power efficiencies. I see opportunities to take technologies from the standard product world and bring these to the FPGA world. This includes process technology and architectures, but also packaging and software.

This is a big focus for R&D for us, but these are very early days.

Currently you offer high performance PowerPC 440 and PowerPC 405 32-bit hard processors and the more flexible 32-bit MicroBlaze soft processor. Do you expect to see any additions to your processor strategy? Would you consider taking an ARM licence?

We have the right technology for the traditional telecoms, industrial military markets. But for other markets we need to make sure we have the right solution. We need to do things in the areas of cost and power.

We will have the appropriate processor architectures for these consumer orientated markets.

So with this focus on processor-defined systems is Xilinx becoming a system-on-chip company?

Yes, in a sense. It is true that we are changing from being technology driven to market driven and as a result we are becoming more viable for the centre of the system. To do this we must understand the needs of the customer and we have over 15,000 customers. As I said earlier, it is not a trivial change we are going through.  

Let us know what you think. If you would like to enter the debate email the editor at: richard.wilson@rbi.co.uk 
 
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