Start-Ups challenge Xilinx, Altera

Can this new bunch of FPGA start-ups succeed where so many have failed? Not if you believe the Big Boys.

What the start-ups like Achronix, Cswitch, Mathstar, Velogix etc have in common is they are targeting the high-performance end of the FPGA market.

“If there is a market for very high speed designs, I’d like to know about it. High speed is a small percentage of total sales,” says Wim Roelandts, CEO of Xilinx which currently has a 53 per cent market share in FPGA and therefore has something considerable to protect.

“There is no third party place and route software”, says Roelandts who helpfully points out: “The place and route software at Xilinx runs to 20m lines of code.”

Yousef Khalilollahi of Achronix, recognizes that: “We need to develop that” and adds: “Having a familiar architecture like ours allows you to buy existing place and route tools, and modify them to fit the architecture.”

Another problem for the start-ups is obtaining IP. “Half of a Virtex 5 is an ASIC, and half is an FPGA, it’s no longer just silicon”, points out Roelandts.

Khalilollahi responds: “IP vendors have to modify ASIC IP for current FPGAs because current FPGA performance is so much worse than ASIC performance, but our performance meets and exceeds ASIC performance, so we don’t burden them with the need to modify their IP. You just plug in the ASIC RTL code.”

A third problem for the start-ups is process. . “None of them is shipping 65nm but, by the time they are out with 65nm, we’ll be out with 45nm,” said Roelandts.

A more comprehensive demolition of the FPGA start-ups ambitions comes from John East, CEO of Actel: “Getting into the programmable logic business now means you’re going to be 20 years behind the leaders,” he says “no matter how many engineers you have, you still don’t have 20 years of experience, 20 years of orders, and 20 years of understanding what’s good and what’s not good.”

There is, of course, a long list of Johnny-come-latelys which tried and failed: Intel, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, IBM, Motorola (now Freescale), NEC, Philips (now NXP), AMD, Agere.