Actel Profits Get Shot in the ARM
By David Manners -- 5/26/2005
Electronics Weekly
The agreement to put ARM cores onto Actel (Field Programmable Gate Array) FPGAs is a long-term plan without significant financial impact until 2008, according to Actel’s President and CEO John East, but then it will deliver a big boost to Actel’s revenues and ARM’s unit shipments.
“We’ll work on ARM, and we’ll optimize it, and make it go faster, and lower the cost and then, after a year and a half, we’ll start winning designs with ARM. From there to moving into production takes a year and a half. So I think it’ll be three years before ARM shows up in the financials.”
The choice of ARM as Actel’s 32-bit core was simple. “ARM is the market leader in 32-bit microprocessors. It’s got more 32-bit processors embedded than anyone else -- billions of them,” said East, “and, if they want a programmable version they have to come to me because I have the only programmable version of ARM.”
The reason why Actel is the only suitable FPGA for a soft ARM core is that the normal SRAM FPGA architecture is insecure because the chip has to be booted from a ROM and, at that point, the netlist of the ARM is sent from the boot ROM to the FPGA. During that transfer the netlist can be read.
Because Actel’s FPGAs, called ProASIC, are based on non-volatile flash memory, rather than SRAM, they do not need that boot process, and can be programmed at the factory so that the embedded IP is secure.
“Our deal is we will give customers ARM -- no charge -- but with one little caveat, the first three FPGAs with ARM, which we give you, instead of charging $5, we’ll charge $500,” adding, “I made that number up because we haven’t announced that yet.”
Electronics Weekly is the London-based sister publication of Electronic News.
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