The future looks bright for distributors that specialize in field-programmable gate array designs. A study from iSuppli Corp. forecasts that the FPGA market will grow 15.9 percent this year, to reach $2.1 billion, and will climb a respective 25.6 percent and 26.4 percent in 2004 and 2005.

Among the distributors looking to leverage that projected growth by enhancing FPGA services is Memec Design.

The company, a part of The Memec Group and a member of the Xilinx AllianceCore program, recently announced intellectual-property core and design service support for Xilinx's Spartan-3 platform FPGAs, which were announced in April.

The Spartan-3 family, built on advanced 90-nanometer and 300-mm wafer-manufacturing technologies, targets high-volume, low-cost applications that have traditionally been filled by custom chips such as ASICs.

4 million gates, $100

The distributor said that it expects to see increased demand from existing FPGA customers as well as traditional ASIC designers who can now have access to 4 million gates for a device price of less than $100.

Targeting such high-volume applications as low-cost routers, storage servers, medical and industrial imaging, and residential gateways in midrange ASICs, the Spartan-3 platform ranges from 50,000 to 5 million system gates. Xilinx said that the platform is the lowest-cost FPGA available.

Cores for the Spartan-3 FPGAs are available from Memec Design under the SignOnce IP License, a multivendor common license agreement for FPGA-based IP. For more information, see www.xilinx.com/ipcenter/signonce.htm or contact Memec Design at www.memecdesign.com/xilinx.

Memec Design offers MemecCore IP cores for such applications as data storage and security, data communications, digital video, telecommunications and embedded and industrial equipment.

The product line is available from Impact Memec, Insight Memec and Unique Memec.

Another distributor that is offering FPGA intellectual property cores is Avnet Cilicon, which jointly delivers Xilinx cores with Cast Inc. as part of Avnet Design Services' Avalon Reference Design System.

Gina Roos covers distribution and components for ProductWeek. Contact her at gmroos@aol.com.

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