Tight Fists Prompt FPGA Conversions
AMI in with TSMC; NEC, Altera off and running; Xilinx out and staying out
By Gale Morrison -- Electronic News, 1/14/2002
e-insite.net
What started last year as a series of skirmishes on the FPGA conversion front appears to be escalating into a full-scale war.
Volume semiconductor buyers continue to cut their silicon bills to the bone, and from all reports they are cutting on all sides. That includes slicing their systems' PLD budgets, which in the past has meant hundreds of dollars per part from companies such as Xilinx, Vertex or Altera for decent speed and size. At the same time, they are slamming the brakes on $500,000-plus photomask sets, whether they're made by their ASIC vendor, their Taiwanese foundry, or internally developed.
In response to those cutbacks, semiconductor vendors with idling gate-array capacity and/or any design conversion expertise are lunging after the FPGA conversion business, promising to migrate the functionality of that FPGA into something less expensive and less time-intensive than a custom ASIC.
NEC Electronics Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., began a gate-array conversion business in the United States last summer; the company now says it's seeing double-digit growth. Altera Corp., the No. 2 PLD supplier, continues to ramp its HardCopy program—which it says is a masked solution, but not a process technology conversion—to keep customers in the fold when they want to go to higher volumes and don't want to pay PLD prices any more. |
