Is programmable logic stuck in a niche? Or has it got a whole new future in the consumer market? Much of the first day of the Globalpress Summit Conference in San Francisco yesterday was devoted to the prospects for the sector.
Bryan Lewis, vice president for research at Gartner, pointed out that programmable logic outperformed the overall semiconductor market last year, with Altera growing 8.8 per cent; Xilinx growing 5.4 per cent, Lattice shrinking by 3.1 per cent and Actel growing by 11.2 per cent compared to an overall semiconductor market which shrank 4.1 per cent.
But how is programmable doing against ASIC? It's a metric which the programmable industry used for many years when programmables ate into the market share of ASICs remorselessly year by year.
No longer, it seems. In 2007, ASICs grew 4.9 per cent while FPGA shrank 3.2 per cent, said Lewis, in 2008, ASICs shrank 2.7 per cent while FPGA grew 5.5 per cent and this year ASICs are expected to shrink 25.9 per cent while FPGA shrinks16.8 per cent.
It would have been much worse for FPGA, said Lewis, had it not been for the 3G roll-out in China.
Programmables remain a $3.6bn niche, while ASIC revenues are $24bn and ASSP revenues are $69bn.
John Daane, CEO of Altera, reckoned: "This year will see the ASIC market declining substantially because the consumer market is going down," adding that consumer represented half the ASIC market.
However Kapil Shankar, CEO of SiliconBlue, disagreed: "The consumer market is alive and well. Designs wins are going strong."
Shankar is hoping to get programmables back into ASIC-beating mode with a play in the consumer market where you need to be low-cost and low-power. SiliconBlue's SRAM-based FPGAs draw 20 microWatts and cost between $1 and $3, said Shankar.
However Shankar was bested by Rich Kapusta of Actel who pointed out that Actel's flash-based Igloo FPGAs draw only 2 microWatts and are the lowest powered FPGAs in the industry. "Our flash-based products grew 38 per cent last year", said Kapusta, "we are the ARM of the FPGA world. We design for low power."
If programmables are ever to get back on to their old track of eating away, year by year, at the ASIC market share it is, it seems, low power and low cost which will get them there, rather than the current fad for putting more fixed functionality into programmables and so narrowing the differentiation between an ASIC and an FPGA.
David Manners, San Francisco
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