Danny Biran, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Altera Corp., gives his insights regarding the outlook for the FPGA industry this year. Excerpts:
What’s the latest development trend for FPGAs and the focus of competition for FPGA companies?At Altera, we have seen FPGAs move from being a prototype or a time-to-market related product to something that can be cost effective in volume manufacturing. This is a direct result of the process advantage that programmable logic has over fixed silicon solutions like ASICs and ASSPs. There are very few markets that have enough volume to offer a reasonable return on investment to build a fixed silicon solution on the latest process node.
Programmable logic serves many markets and many customers, which allows it to invest in the last process node and use the process gap advantage to compete directly against ASICs and ASSPs for all but the highest volume applications. And so, as we find that the ASICs and the ASSPs are disappearing from the infrastructure side of the end-systems market, the FPGA is really emerging as one of the products of choice to go in and replace those devices.
Additionally, the historical performance gap between FPGAs and standard products is no longer a factor. The bottleneck in most systems today is I/O bandwidth as a result of systems processing video, voice and data. The key to I/O bandwidth is transceiver performance and this is an area that new FPGAs have an advantage over other solutions. Moreover Altera offers the highest performance transceivers in its Stratix IV GT products that reach 11.3 Gbps. The combination of the transceivers we have at 40 nm, with the performance and the density of the FPGAs, allows us to really take a lot of share away from ASICs and ASSPs.
What will be the next process node for Altera’s product innovation?The next node for Altera will be 28nm. You'll see both software and silicon from us in 2010. Altera is currently shipping its Stratix and Arria product families on 40nm. Altera began shipping 40nm products in 4Q08 and is now in full production.
Altera has a long history of reliably rolling out products on new process nodes even when other companies have challenges. One of the reasons Altera does a better job than other companies rolling out new process nodes is because we deploy test chips early on to test out all of the device modules, including PLLs, I/O structures, ESD structures, the core logic fabric and memories. This allows us to develop our own DFM design rules that ensure best in class yields when the product rolls out. It's been one of the reasons why Altera has been able to develop chips and get the final product to market at a much more accelerated rate than our competition over a long period of time.
What will Altera do to help engineers make designs with FPGAs easier and more flexible?Altera recognizes that the complexity of designs is increasing and companies need to get those designs to market more quickly. To simplify designs and increase the productivity of design teams, Altera has made considerable investments over the years in our Quartus II design software. Currently, Quartus II is the industry’s number one FPGA design tool in terms of performance and productivity. Altera has a leadership position in simulation, synthesis, compile times and power analysis. For example, in the area of power analysis, Altera offers Programmable Power Technology where the non-critical timing paths in the FPGA are programmed by Quartus II to run slower and consume much less power. This does not impact the FPGA performance because the timing critical paths continue to operate at the highest performance, but the power of the device is reduced by up to 35 percent. We are committed to continuing that leadership and will be adding new features in 2010 that increase the performance of designs and make the designs easier for our customers.
Altera
