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EDN.COMMENT: Are we there yet?

Once again, we have FPGA-market news in this edition; another start-up—Tier Logic—and phase two of March's newcomer Tabula's revelations about its product plans. I use the word "new" about Tabula, but in reality the gestation of the company has been prolonged, and it has figured for some time in lists that industry observers compile of potential new players in the sector (such as "…and then there's Tabula but no-one knows quite what they are up to….").

Technically, its concept is challenging, and the challenge for Tabula in gaining entry to many markets will extend to convincing potential users about the viability of programmable logic, all over again. First time around, FPGA vendors had to work hard to convince some users that they could rely on logic whose function depended only on volatile SRAM bits: they may take some further convincing that logic whose existence is even more ephemeral will be something they can build a product on. Tier's concept, in contrast, is much easier to get a grasp of; in one step it recaptures some of the silicon area lost to making chips programmable in the first place.

And then, there's the problem of breaking into a sector in which the two leading companies are so very dominant. For sure, Tabula is well funded; but I offer you a quote from another player in the same market, who should probably remain anonymous: "Do you know how much venture capital has gone into programmable-logic start-ups in the last few years? At least $1.5 billion. And with what market impact? None at all."

As with every new entrant in the field, I have to ask, "Does this development constitute programmable logic finally living up to its ultimate promise?" Thus far, the answer has been, "no"—but I live in hope, and I make no apology for repeatedly asking the question, because there is a big prize out there somewhere. Think back a decade and revisit some of the directions in which the industry seemed to be heading. All the talk then was of the virtual corporation: re-run the last ten years, and we should all now be working from our garages, forming ad-hoc groups of designers working on innovative and advanced, mass-market product concepts. We would be buyingin multiple pre-qualified blocks of IP, assembling them in a virtual prototype, and the EDA tools would quickly reduce them to design files for a singlechip SoC (System-on-Chip) device.

Of course, that vision never came about; large-scale ASICs and SoC chips became impossibly expensive for any but the largest projects and companies; and the largest FPGAs, which would support designs on the SoC scale, continue to cost too much to be the basis of high-volume production runs. That's not to deny that each has well-established market successes: simply that the technology to implement that grand late-1990s vision has yet to emerge. Now comes this new contender, promising system-scale logic resources at volume-market prices. Is the idea of complex, but affordable, custom silicon-for-all finally within our grasp? I'm not about to make that prediction: but there appears to be enough about this offering to deserve close study, at the very least.

Now, how about a few programmable-analogue tiles on the same chip to make it truly the basis of a single-chip product? I asked Tabula CTO Steve Teig that question… for some reason he appeared to think he had enough to deal with for now, introducing the logic device—but he didn't rule it out.