COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. " The long-anticipated tipping point where FPGAs replace gate arrays is upon us, with the obsolescence of cell-based ASICs and structured arrays not far behind, according to an FPGA User Survey conducted by EE Times, Piper-Jaffray, and the FPGA Mission Assurance Center at Sandia National Labs.
The survey shows continuing dominance of the market by Xilinx Inc. and Altera Corp., with Actel Corp. the only FPGA vendor to move into double-digit user support in some categories.
The survey, conducted by Wilson Research Group from a base of more than 400 qualified hardware and software engineers, indicates continuing difficulty in recruiting engineers familiar with FPGA design. Many projects experience at least 30 days' delay in a system design, with the most common result being a delay in an overall program. While the leading cause of such delays is a system design complexity, the second most cited problem is a difficulty to recruit and train engineers familiar with FPGAs.
In listing reasons for choosing FPGAs over ASICs, more than 50 percent of respondents cited "time to market" and "ASIC NRE costs." Also high among the citations were "production volumes" and "cost of design tools."
Users expressed the most dissatisfaction in FPGA design tools in routing and timing estimation, where close to 50 percent said the tools could be better. On several fronts regarding the physical qualities of FPGAs, Xilinx maintained a significant lead in the 40-percent range, followed by Altera in the high 20s. The one realm where Actel was listed by more than 20 percent of respondents was in power consumption.
A full survey can be purchased in late October at the EE Times Market Intelligence Unit site.
A comprehensive suite of data from Embedded.com's 2008 user survey, this report unearths some surprises among embedded developers: a decline in interest in embedded Linux, a reticence to use source-code analysis tools, and significant increases in the delays in development projects.
A joint project of EE Times, Piper-Jaffray, and Sandia National Laboratories' FPGA Mission Assurance Center, this report updates the 2006 survey by showing that the shift from wide-scale ASIC use to production FPGAs has already occurred. This year's report includes expanded sections for analog components and military-aerospace applications.
A comprehensive overview of venture investments in the electronics industry made during calendar year 2007. This study focuses on areas such as "cleantech" investment, fabless semiconductor investment, and wireless end markets such as WiMax. Available as a PDF report, and as a combined report and Excel spreadsheet.
Waiting for the Mobile Payments Global Infrastructure - Near-Field Communications holds the promise of being the underlying technology for all mobile payment schemes. But NFC has faced a long gestation, driven by slow development of application software and a variety of chip-set support schemes. This report provides a careful look at when NFC and contactless payments from a handset can experience the growth rates promised for the last five years.
The uncertain extent of primary telecom transport cannibalization of form factors turns on the hinges of global deployments. Current trends suggest a rapid transition in the North American market from full-sized ATCA to uTCA and its smaller cousins, like PicoTCA. If carriers in Asia and Europe follow this trend to smaller, more power-efficient central offices and POPs, overall ATCA shipments may be dominated by uTCA well before 2015. If traditional rack-mount sizes dominate in overseas markets, full-sized ATCA could carve out its own portion of the market of a size approaching several billion dollars per year by 2015. In any event, the drive toward standardization will favor the growth of an overall ATCA/uTCA market to a point exceeding $5 billion per year by 2012.
In 2007, the IEEE 802.3 working group for Ethernet took a revolutionary step and approved two separate paths beyond 10 Gbit/sec speeds: one standard is for 40-Gbit/sec Ethernet channels, the other for 100-Gbit/sec channels. Today, the choice of two speeds could accelerate design for those who were hesitant at moving directly to 100 Gbits/sec, or it could slow implementation of practical prototypes by diluting efforts to develop a faster Ethernet. Early indications suggest the first alternative remains the most likely, and this implies that a 40-Gbit/sec market will be first to emerge.
The semiconductor industry has dominated electronics for four decades using silicon and other elements doped with inorganic materials. A new generation of technology aims to use organic polymers to produce light emitting diodes (LEDs) and transistors that use less power, are lighter and more flexible and can be made more cheaply using ink jet printing techniques and low cost materials.
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