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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 29, 2009

Launch window closed?

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An encounter yesterday with John East, President and CEO of Actel; setting out his view of the programmable device sector, East says that in recent times Actel has gained some market share on the other companies in the field, albeit in a market where Xilinx and Altera between them have about 90%-market share. “There’s no [economic recovery] boom going on out there,” East says, “we have [at times] been going backwards a bit slower that the others, or growing a little more than them.” Always entertaining to listen to, East is forthright about the prospects for the group of startups currently trying to break into the programmable device market, “None of the new startups can succeed….it’s far too late for anyone to break into this market… it [the PLD market] has been through the consolidation phase and has settled to a couple of big players plus a few small ones (East includes Actel, Lattice and Quicklogic here).” He adds, “With one exception they [the startups] are aiming for the mainstream market in which Xilinx and Altera are already dominant; SRAM-based PLDs, [predominantly] for the datapath in communications infrastructure.”
East says that Actel will continue its strategy of aiming to satisfy, and expand, sectors that aren’t prime targets for the “big two”, and away from that communications-centric sector; it will continue to focus on flash-based devices, with (in the case of its Fusion product line) analogue features on-chip, for embedded system designs that are increasingly portable and battery-powered. At the same time, Actel will continue to provide devices based on what might now be considered a legacy technology, the antifuse, for space and defence applications. East confirms that Actel is no longer researching antifuses; great efforts have been expended to create a “reprogrammable antifuse” but Actel’s physicists have concluded that, in any practical sense, it can’t be done, “You can make an antifuse, that’s reprogrammable for some number of cycles, but what you would like is [for such a device] for it to work in a current-carrying mode, and that doesn’t appear to be possible.”

Related entries in: Programmable Logic/ Memory |

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