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Singh_Y
October is always a troubling month in a Semi cycle trending lower and with cuts ...
BobsUrUncle
Desperation move. Guess they don't have enough customers for the FPGA. Now they ...
Achronix shifts gears, offers FPGA IP for SoCs
Peter Clarke
10/4/2012 7:10 PM EDT
eFPGA
FPGA programmability has traditionally been supplied at the board level with a separate packaged device. Holt said attempts had been made to include separate logic and FPGA die in one package but with less success. Die-level integration is the next stage of that integration evolution, Holt argued.
By way of an illustration of the Achronix IP offering Holt flashed up three embedded FPGA (eFPGA) macros with between 100,000 and 1 million effective gates and occupying between 2.1 and 19.2 square millimeters in Intel's 22-nm FinFET process. However, Holt admitted that most of the customers Achronix is engaged with today are looking for custom FPGA fabrics.
In his presentation Holt said: "Depending on the performance and power requirements, the die area for some of these fabric components can be reduced by up to 40 percent. We are also planning to support advanced TSMC processes in 2013."
Holt also admitted that while its IP business line will be foundry agnostic, all its present IP licensees are targeting TSMC. He added that Achronix could probably get customers to market faster with an Intel-produced chip as the FPGA fabric is fully characterized. "Intel foundry is not averse to this if the volumes are right," Holt said.
However, doubts about the approach remain. One is how to connect the FPGA fabric into the on-chip bus to guarantee to provide suitable additional resources for all the disruptions the design team might be trying to insure against.
Holt said Achronix now envisions three EDA design flows in support of its FPGA technology. The first is the standard flow that allows engineers to program Achronix FPGAs down to the RTL level, which Achronix has offered since 2008. The second is an integrated SoC/FPGA design flow to support the addition of FPGA fabric in SoCs and allow the fabric to be programmed. The third EDA flow will extend that FPGA fabric programmability to users to support functional reconfigurability.
Achronix' current business plan of record is to conduct an initial public offering in 2014. To achieve that, Holt reckons the company will need $100 million of annual sales and 70-plus percent gross margins. "I want to stay high margin, to get into handsets," he said.
Related links and articles:
www.achronix.com
News articles:
FPGA programmability has traditionally been supplied at the board level with a separate packaged device. Holt said attempts had been made to include separate logic and FPGA die in one package but with less success. Die-level integration is the next stage of that integration evolution, Holt argued.
By way of an illustration of the Achronix IP offering Holt flashed up three embedded FPGA (eFPGA) macros with between 100,000 and 1 million effective gates and occupying between 2.1 and 19.2 square millimeters in Intel's 22-nm FinFET process. However, Holt admitted that most of the customers Achronix is engaged with today are looking for custom FPGA fabrics.
In his presentation Holt said: "Depending on the performance and power requirements, the die area for some of these fabric components can be reduced by up to 40 percent. We are also planning to support advanced TSMC processes in 2013."
Holt also admitted that while its IP business line will be foundry agnostic, all its present IP licensees are targeting TSMC. He added that Achronix could probably get customers to market faster with an Intel-produced chip as the FPGA fabric is fully characterized. "Intel foundry is not averse to this if the volumes are right," Holt said.
However, doubts about the approach remain. One is how to connect the FPGA fabric into the on-chip bus to guarantee to provide suitable additional resources for all the disruptions the design team might be trying to insure against.
Holt said Achronix now envisions three EDA design flows in support of its FPGA technology. The first is the standard flow that allows engineers to program Achronix FPGAs down to the RTL level, which Achronix has offered since 2008. The second is an integrated SoC/FPGA design flow to support the addition of FPGA fabric in SoCs and allow the fabric to be programmed. The third EDA flow will extend that FPGA fabric programmability to users to support functional reconfigurability.
Achronix' current business plan of record is to conduct an initial public offering in 2014. To achieve that, Holt reckons the company will need $100 million of annual sales and 70-plus percent gross margins. "I want to stay high margin, to get into handsets," he said.
Related links and articles:
www.achronix.com
News articles:
- Achronix chairman: Intel foundry gambit poised for payoff
- Intel to fab FPGAs for startup Achronix
- Achronix reveals 22-nm FPGAs, courtesy of Intel
- Intel makes flow processor with ARM inside
- FPGA veteran drafted to lead Achronix
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SZA
10/5/2012 6:25 AM EDT
Thats really a nice sign. The importance of eFPGAs IP is undeniable.
Indeed the effective connection/interfacing of the 3rd party eFPGA IP with SoC will be a challenge (compared to HardARM FPGAs of Xilinx, Altera), but is much needed move forward for Industry to bring the custom programmablity power of FPGAs in SoCs.
An interesting point is almost all FPGA vendors are/have converged to TSMC. If eFPGA IP marriage really succeeds and SoC-FPGA bet of Xilinx/Altera shoots off, who knows, perhaps in 5 years FPGA vendors augment a competitive eFPGA IP offering too in their business line.
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iniewski
10/5/2012 11:30 AM EDT
6 billion transistor FPGA! Would this be the largest FPGA in the world???
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Jan.Gray
10/6/2012 12:48 PM EDT
It could be the largest monolithic FPGA. The Xilinx Virtex-7 2000T is ~6.8B transistors but is implemented as 4 dice on an interposer.
[http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4230048/Xilinx-announces-world-s-highest-capacity-FPGA]
It would be interesting to hear what became of the 2002-era IBM offering of Xilinx FPGA cores in their 90nm ASIC products.
[http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4102293/Xilinx-ASIC-vendors-talk-licensing]
[http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/632.wss]
[http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/white_papers/wp164.pdf]
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RalphZ
10/8/2012 4:23 PM EDT
To the last comment, in addition to IBM, in 2001, Adaptive Silicon launched its licensable programmable logic IP core. We found lots of interest, but the 2001 financial crash limited additional funding, and the company had to close down in 2002. Also with the programmable core taking about 100X the area of custom logic on a gate for gate basis,its use needs to be restricted to flexible IOs, and smaller functional blocks. But conceptually, using reconfigurable cores is better than taping out half a dozen different variants of the same part. Eventually, the technology re-emerged in standard part company Stretch, Inc.
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peter.clarke
10/10/2012 6:05 AM EDT
@RalphZ
Thanks for the additional insight.
It is the case that very few FPGA fabric licensors have been successful....but some FPGA vendors have turned themselves into application-specific chip vendors.
John Lofton Holt claimed that FPGA fabric licesing would not conflict with selling high-performance FPGAs as the markets, volumes and economics are different.
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BobsUrUncle
10/10/2012 7:56 AM EDT
Desperation move. Guess they don't have enough customers for the FPGA. Now they are going to have to shift engineering resources to explaining how the fabric works to the likes of TSMC.
Look for an early demise for this company, Intel or no Intel.
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Singh_Y
10/19/2012 8:21 PM EDT
October is always a troubling month in a Semi cycle trending lower and with cuts looming at AMD and Xilinx announcing cuts in discretionary spending. What they are implying is that they are open to licensing their FPGA fabric to the big 2 - XILINX and ALTERA; other than that the only other player would be Broadcom that is still digesting Netlogic Microsystems; Since their products are geared for high performance and are very expensive it may be a sign from their VCs pushing Management to sign on more customers. Someone may take them out for Pennies on the $
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