I just pulled this from a posting on the Xilinx thread:
"After the market closed, XILINX INC said it will discontinue its
XC8100 family of programmable antifuse devices due to strong market
acceptance of static random access memory (SRAM) and FLASH
technologies. Xilinx said it will take a $5.0 million, pre-tax
charge against upcoming earnings to account for its inventories and
those of its distributors and foundry partners. Xilinx said it will
focus on core field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and complex
programmable logic devices (CPLDs). (REUTER 17:07 EDT 07-31-96)"
My comments:
Xilinx spent many yrs developing antifuse based FPGAs and even had a patent cross license with ACTL to avoid infringing ACTL patents. The 8100 family was announced with great fanfare a couple yrs back and was touted as the answer to achieving low cost high volume solutions. It was also positioned as the only synthesis friendly FPGA architecture. Actel, as you all know, has greater than 95% market share in antifuse based FPGAs and claims significant advantages over SRAM, EEPROM, and FLASH technologies for many applications.
Xilinx will no-doubt try to paint the antifuse effort as a waste of time, a dead end technology, etc. Will the market (people who actually buy products) or the street (that other market) react favorably or disfavorably toward Actel on this news? One man's monopoly is another man's dead end technology, so let's just wait and see. I personally believe that Actel will do a better job taking advantage of the Xilinx patents to which they have license than Xilinx did with the antifuse patents from ACTL. I also firmly believe that there are applications for all three leading technologies: antifuse, SRAM, and EE/ FLASH.
The Actel SPGA announcement this week in EETimes by the way is not an SRAM based product family. Stay tuned.
-tt |
