Q5 Interview - John Lofton Holt, Achronix

John Lofton Holt - Achronix founder, chairman and CEO - talks to Electronics Weekly about breaking into the FPGA market, whether FPGAs become just another SoC device by another name, and how important design tools and software IP will be to the company's strategy...

1. Describe Achronix's technology and business in 2 sentences.

Achronix is a privately held fabless semiconductor corporation based in San Jose, and with offices in India, Korea, and Japan. Achronix builds the world's fastest field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) which use a patented circuit technology and leverage familiar tools and design methodologies, to provide 1.5 GHz speeds, triple the performance of traditional FPGA technology.

2. Why is now the best time to break into the FPGA market?

The macroeconomic challenges are forcing the entire electronics value chain to cut costs-from customers, to system manufacturers, to semiconductor companies to foundries.

At the same time, customers across every vertical market are innovating to develop higher performance and lower-power products. The confluence of these factors forces customers to make tough design tradeoffs, such as avoiding costly ASICs and reducing time to market, all while trying to develop higher performance and lower power products.

Existing FPGA manufacturers help customers with the cost and power factors, but these solutions have not provided increased performance, leaving a large gap. Achronix recognized this performance gap as an opportunity. Late last year, we launched our Speedster product family, which provides unprecedented performance, lower risk and faster time to market than ASICs. Our FPGA solution - using familiar tools and silicon that are well understood by the design community - delivers a true high-performance solution to customers that no other programmable logic vendor can.

3. How do you intend to break the market dominance of the two leading FPGA suppliers?

Xilinx and Altera spend well over a half-billion dollars a year on R&D. No small company can compete with these market leaders head-to-head and socket-to-socket in their core markets.

From the very beginning of our company, our strategy was not to break the market dominance of the two leading FPGA vendors in their core markets. Instead, we are leveraging their success by providing a familiar but high-performance solution to a set of customers that are hungry for a programmable logic solution but need ASIC-like performance. This establishes Achronix in the FPGA space, not by competing with the market leaders, but by offering a solution where the current market leaders have no solution.

This allows us to attack a multibillion-dollar market without competing directly, which is a good place for a small company like ours to quickly grow.

4. Do you see the FPGA becoming just another SoC device by another name?

A look "under the hood" of our first Speedster device in production today - the SPD60-reveals 10.3 Gbps SerDes, 5 Gbps SerDes, PLLs, DLLs, memories, DDR1/2/3 controllers, and a multimillion-gate programmable fabric. That much defines an SoC.

As customers seek to innovate in performance, power, and design flexibility, the FPGA will continue to be seen as an attractive alternative to discrete solutions, ASICs and costly custom-developed SoCs. A traditional challenge for FPGAs in providing true SoC capabilities has been accommodating the design complexities of customers. But in 65nm and beyond, FPGAs are able to achieve significant levels of complexity and expand the market applications for which they're excellent choices. That's why the FPGA market share continues to increase, despite the global economic downturn.

5. How important will design tools and software IP be to your strategy?

My background is in management consulting, and when we started Achronix in 2004, we put those skills to work to look at why so many FPGA startups had suffered technology or business failure. We found that every FPGA company that failed had developed an FPGA with some combination of unfamiliar silicon and unfamiliar tools.

For this reason, since day one at Achronix, we have made sure that our silicon -  but most importantly our software tools and our IP - look and feel just like tools and IP from the market leaders.

This is also why we have multi-year agreements with Mentor Graphics and Synopsys (Synplicity) to provide their industry-leading synthesis tools to all of our customers at little to no cost. An FPGA company is essentially an EDA company that monetizes its solution in silicon. This is why it is so important to get the tools right, and to get them right the first time.

With our Speedster FPGAs, designers leverage their existing RTL (Verilog or VHDL), their existing synthesis tools, their existing simulators, and our familiar place-and-route solution to implement their design - just like they would with any other FPGA. This, combined with our unprecedented performance, is why we have already seen tremendous success with Speedster.

See also: Q5 - Interviews with electronics industry leaders
Read all the Electronics Weekly Q5 interviews. From ARM's chairman, Sir Robin Saxby, to touchscreen technology firm Zytronic's MD, Mark Cambridge, the business leaders share their particular insights on the UK electronics industry.