Moshe Gavrielov, president and CEO of Xilinx talks to Electronics Weekly in the latest in a series of exclusive interviews where CEOs give their impressions of the last 12 months and point to the challenges and opportunities which lie ahead for the industry.
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In 2009, a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ analogy couldn’t be a more fitting description of the experience of semiconductor companies – and the global electronics markets we serve.
The economic downturn accelerated business and technology challenges already in play. Driven by fickle, fragmented consumer markets and relentless demand for hyper-connectivity and mobility, design teams faced shrinking time-to-market windows, capped engineering budgets, escalating Asic and ASSP non-recurring engineering costs, spiraling design complexity, and increased risk.
To survive, the world’s leading electronics companies have been forced to adapt.
Companies must do more with less and increase return on investment for every R&D dollar spent by improving engineering productivity. They must mitigate risk by building flexibility into every aspect of the development process.
In turn, traditional semiconductor companies and integrated device manufacturers have fought to survive in the face of new economic and market realities.
Consolidation and target market rationalisation have become the watchwords of the day, with companies battling it out in the market place in pursuit of a short list of ultra-high-volume commodity applications.
In the new world order, incumbent semiconductor business models have proven unsustainable, driving demand for more cost-effective, flexible, programmable alternatives to enable low-cost innovation.
For a growing class of underserved mid-to-high-volume applications in myriad end markets, programmability has become an imperative.
Author is Moshe Gavrielov, president and CEO of Xilinx