Silicon Valley Nation
Silicon Valley Nation: Disrupting the fabric
Brian Fuller
2/5/2013 7:38 PM EST
SAN FRANCISCO--The beauty of this industry is its relentless change.
Yes, sometimes it can be horrifying, especially when your pride and
joy (and successful) technology just got disrupted by something
totally unexpected, but that's what keeps us honest.
The challenge we have as engineers, business people and observers is to try to anticipate just what form the next change looks like.
Take programmable logic, which was itself a disruptive technology when it roared onto the scene in the 1980s. For the first two decades of its existence, programmable logic--particularly FPGAs--played an excellent design role as glue logic and prototyping vehicle.
But as Moore's Law progressed, FPGAs got smaller and more powerful, and new opportunities arose. First came microprocessor cores--some home-grown by FPGAs, others licensed from IBM or ARM or MIPS. Quickly other IP cores started weaving their way onto FPGAs, memories, phase-locked loops and the like.
Today, it seems to me, FPGAs are at a crossroads. I thought about this on a conference call with Mahesh Tirupattur, executive vice president with clocking and interconnect cores vendor Analog Bits, and Paul Ekas, marketing vice president with Microsemi Corp. They carved out some time in their day to talk about Microsemi deploying Analog Bits' Serdes ip in its SmartFusion 2 SoCs. The ip is aimed at serving applications such as PCI Express Gen1/Gen2, up to 10G ethernet and other interfaces.
Make v. Buy
This was a make or buy decision for Microsemi.
"This was a major de-risking for us," Ekas said. "We're new to transceivers. We had to make sure whatever we got into the product worked. They have a track record of delivery." (Analog Bits has supplied PLLs to Microsemi for some time).
This is an intriguing comment from a company (Microsemi) that does a fair amount of its own ip development, while also buying microprocessor cores from ARM and memory-controller cores from other vendors.
So, over time, what value proposition will FPGA vendors provide? Today, it's their programmable fabric, but that piece of real estate in some cases is shrinking relatively to other blocks on ip on chip. And you're stuck using their back-end tools. Often that's OK, but in an open-source, plug-and-play world, how long can that last?
"We recognize in the end, that what the customers are doing is trying to deliver more performance and lower cost or lower power at lower cost with limited resources," Ekas said. "And they take that in environment that moves quickly forward."
"The enablers are the fabric and integrating (ip) responsibly to the market segments," Ekas said.
It's a platform world (Ekas used the word and Xilinx is pushing that positioning big time), but whose platform and what form will it take in the years ahead? And, if more of the value of an "FPGA" is derived from specialty cores, what's to prevent something/someone from disrupting the function of the fabric?
I know some of you out there are working on this in one form another. Let us know what you're doing.
The challenge we have as engineers, business people and observers is to try to anticipate just what form the next change looks like.
Take programmable logic, which was itself a disruptive technology when it roared onto the scene in the 1980s. For the first two decades of its existence, programmable logic--particularly FPGAs--played an excellent design role as glue logic and prototyping vehicle.
But as Moore's Law progressed, FPGAs got smaller and more powerful, and new opportunities arose. First came microprocessor cores--some home-grown by FPGAs, others licensed from IBM or ARM or MIPS. Quickly other IP cores started weaving their way onto FPGAs, memories, phase-locked loops and the like.
Today, it seems to me, FPGAs are at a crossroads. I thought about this on a conference call with Mahesh Tirupattur, executive vice president with clocking and interconnect cores vendor Analog Bits, and Paul Ekas, marketing vice president with Microsemi Corp. They carved out some time in their day to talk about Microsemi deploying Analog Bits' Serdes ip in its SmartFusion 2 SoCs. The ip is aimed at serving applications such as PCI Express Gen1/Gen2, up to 10G ethernet and other interfaces.
Make v. Buy
This was a make or buy decision for Microsemi.
"This was a major de-risking for us," Ekas said. "We're new to transceivers. We had to make sure whatever we got into the product worked. They have a track record of delivery." (Analog Bits has supplied PLLs to Microsemi for some time).
This is an intriguing comment from a company (Microsemi) that does a fair amount of its own ip development, while also buying microprocessor cores from ARM and memory-controller cores from other vendors.
So, over time, what value proposition will FPGA vendors provide? Today, it's their programmable fabric, but that piece of real estate in some cases is shrinking relatively to other blocks on ip on chip. And you're stuck using their back-end tools. Often that's OK, but in an open-source, plug-and-play world, how long can that last?
"We recognize in the end, that what the customers are doing is trying to deliver more performance and lower cost or lower power at lower cost with limited resources," Ekas said. "And they take that in environment that moves quickly forward."
"The enablers are the fabric and integrating (ip) responsibly to the market segments," Ekas said.
It's a platform world (Ekas used the word and Xilinx is pushing that positioning big time), but whose platform and what form will it take in the years ahead? And, if more of the value of an "FPGA" is derived from specialty cores, what's to prevent something/someone from disrupting the function of the fabric?
I know some of you out there are working on this in one form another. Let us know what you're doing.
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