•  
• EDN Europe MAGAZINE
•  
• Free SUBSCRIPTION
• Subscription Renewal
• View Media Kit

• EDN
• EDN Australia
• EDN Asia
• EDN China
• EDN Japan

EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

FPGAs, with a twist

| Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |

| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

For a market sector that ought to be taking over the world – the digital logic world, at any rate – new entrants to the programmable logic scene have a tough time. I just posted a news item about Achronix, which isn’t, in fact, all that new an entrant to the scene, but here on EDNE we try to write about things that you can go out and buy, if not today then in the very near future. And although Achronix has been around for about three years, that hasn’t appeared to be the case until now. Now, though, the company says that privileged customers have had the silicon and tools (“An FPGA company is all about tools,” as CEO John Holt acknowledges) for some weeks now, so we’ll take that assurance at face value. Achronix’ product appears to have been devised to look as much like a “brand X” or “brand A” device as possible (in terms of how you design with it) while seeking to divert the wrath of said brands by declaring that it’s not seeking to compete with them, but instead going after higher-speed logic sockets than they can address.
Achronix’ management team have experience gained in most of the leading programmable logic companies; some of them are also veterans of LSI Logic’s RapidChip programme, so they should know all about the things to avoid in configurable logic concepts that don’t work in the market.
From one point of view, Xilinx, Altera et al should welcome a new entrant that (assuming it can do what it says on the packet) widens the applicability of the programmable approach to logic. For the whole sector, another blow struck at the dead-man-walking that is the ASIC business, can’t be a bad thing.

Related entries in: EDA/ IP | High-Speed Design | Programmable Logic/ Memory |

Post a comment

* Display Name
* Comments
* Anti Spam security code	To pervent spamming, please enter the anti-spam code as shown above to proceed with the submission