{"id":248,"date":"2011-03-25T20:04:28","date_gmt":"2011-03-26T03:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/?p=248"},"modified":"2016-01-17T17:45:24","modified_gmt":"2016-01-18T01:45:24","slug":"landscape-of-programmable-logic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/?p=248","title":{"rendered":"The Programmable Logic Landscape 2011 A.D."},"content":{"rendered":"

I think it’s high time I authored a completely opinion-based article full of observations and my own prejudices that might result in a littany of\u00a0ad hominem attacks\u00a0and insults.\u00a0 Or at least, I hope it does.\u00a0 This little bit of prose will outline my view of the world of programmable logic<\/a> as I see it today.\u00a0 Again, it is as I <\/em><\/strong>see it.\u00a0 You might see it differently.\u00a0 But you would be wrong.<\/p>\n

First let’s look at the players.\u00a0 The two headed Cerberus<\/a> of the programmable logic world is Altera<\/a> and Xilinx<\/a>.\u00a0 They battle it out for the bulk of the end-user market share.\u00a0 After that, there are a series of niche players (Lattice Semiconductor<\/a>, Microsemi<\/a> (who recently purchased Actel<\/a>) and\u00a0Quicklogic<\/a>), lesser lights (Atmel<\/a> and\u00a0Cypress<\/a>) and wishful upstarts (Tabula<\/a>, Achronix<\/a> and SiliconBlue).<\/p>\n

Atmel<\/a> and\u00a0Cypress<\/a> are broadline suppliers of specialty semiconductors.\u00a0 They each sell a small portfolio of basic programmable logic devices (Atmel CPLDs<\/a>, Atmel FPGAs and Cypress CPLDs).\u00a0 As best I can tell, they do this for two reasons.\u00a0 First, they entered the marketplace and have been in it for about 15 years and at this point have just enough key customers using the devices such that the cost of exiting the market would be greater than the cost of keeping these big customers happy.\u00a0 The technology is not, by any stretch of the imagination, state of the art<\/a> so the relative cost of supporting and manufacturing these parts is small.\u00a0 Second, as a broadline supplier of a wide variety of specialty semiconductors, it’s nice for their sales team to have a PLD to toss into a customer’s solution to stitch together all that other stuff they bought from them.\u00a0 All told, you’re not going to see any profound innovations from these folks in the programmable logic space.\u00a0 ‘Nuff said<\/a> about these players, then.<\/p>\n

At the top of the programmable logic food chain are Altera<\/a> and Xilinx<\/a>.\u00a0 These two titans battle head-to-head and every few years exchange the lead.\u00a0 Currently, Altera has leapt or will leap ahead of Xilinx in technology<\/a>, market share<\/a> and market capitalization<\/a>.\u00a0 But when it comes to innovation and new ideas, both companies typically offer incremental innovations rather than risky quantum leaps ahead.\u00a0 They are both clearly pursuing a policy that chases the high end, fat margin devices, focusing more and more on the big, sophisticated end-user who is most happy with greater complexity, capacity and speed.\u00a0 Those margin leaders are Xilinx’s Virtex<\/a> families and Altera’s Stratix series. The\u00a0sweet spot for these devices are low volume, high cost equipment like network equipment, storage systemcontroller and cell phone base stations.\u00a0Oddly though, Altera’s recent leap to the lead can be traced to their mid-price Arria<\/a> and low-price Cyclone families that offered lower power and lower price point with the right level of functionality for a wider swath of customers.\u00a0 Xilinx had no response having not produced a similarly featured device from the release of the Spartan3<\/a> (and its variants)\u00a0until the arrival of the Spartan6<\/a> some\u00a04 years later.\u00a0 This gap provided just the opportunity that Altera needed to gobble up a huge portion of a growing market.\u00a0 And then, when Xilinx’s Spartan6\u00a0finally arrived, its entry to production was marked by bumpiness and a certain amount of “So what?” from end-users who were about to or already did already migrate to Altera.<\/p>\n

The battle between Altera and Xilinx is based on ever-shrinking technology nodes, ever-increasing logic capacity, faster speeds and\u00a0a widening variety of IP cores (hard and soft) and, of course, competitive pricing.\u00a0 There has been little effort on the part of either company to provide any sort of quantum leap of innovation since there is substantial risk involved.\u00a0 The overall programmable logic market is behaving more like a commodity market.\u00a0 The true differentiation is price since the feature sets are basically identical.\u00a0 If you try to do some risky innovation, you will likely have to divert efforts from your base technology.\u00a0 And it is that base technology\u00a0that delivers those fat margins.\u00a0 If that risky innovation falls flat, you miss a generation and lose those fat margins and\u00a0market share.<\/p>\n

Xilinx’s recent announcement of the unfortunately named Zynq<\/a> device\u00a0might be such a quantum innovative leap but it’s hard to tell from the promotional material since it is long on fluff and short on facts.\u00a0 Is it really substantially different from the Virtex4FX<\/a> from 2004?\u00a0 Maybe it isn’t because its announcement does not seem to have instilled any sort of fear over at Altera.\u00a0 Or maybe Altera is just too frightened to respond?<\/p>\n

Lattice Semiconductor<\/a> has worked hard to find little market niches to serve.\u00a0 They have done this by focusing mostly on price and acquisitions.\u00a0 Historically the leader in in-system programmable devices, Lattice saw this lead erode as Xilinx and Altera entered that market using an open standard<\/a> (rather than a proprietary<\/a> one, as Lattice did).\u00a0 In response, Lattice moved to the open standard, acquired FPGA technology<\/a> and\u00a0tried to develop other programmable niche markets (e.g., switches<\/a>, analog<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0 Lattice has continued to move opportunistically; shifting quickly at the margins of the market to find unserved or underserved programmable logic end-users, with a strong emphasis on price competitiveness.\u00a0 They have had erratic results and limited success with this strategy and have seen their market share continue to erode.<\/p>\n

Microsemi<\/a> owns the antifuse<\/a> programmable technology market.\u00a0 This technology is strongly favored by end-users who want\u00a0high reliability in their programmable logic.\u00a0 Unlike the static RAM-based programmable technologies used by most every other manufacturer, antifuse is not susceptible to single event upsets<\/a> making it ideal for space, defense\u00a0and similar applications. The downside of this technology is that unlike static RAM, antifuse is not reprogrammable.\u00a0 You can only program it once and if you need to fix your downloaded design, you need to get a new part, program it with the new pattern and replace the old part with the new part.\u00a0 Microsemi has attempted to broaden their product offering into more traditional markets by offering more conventional FPGAs.\u00a0 However, rather than basing their FPGA’s programmability on static RAM,\u00a0the Microsemi product, ProASIC<\/a>,\u00a0uses flash technology.\u00a0 A nice incremental innovation offering its own benefits (non-volatile pattern storage) and costs (flash does not scale well with shrinking technology nodes).\u00a0In addition, Microtec is already shipping a Zynq-like device known as the SmartFusion<\/a> family.\u00a0 The SmartFusion device has hard analog IP included.\u00a0 As best I can tell, Zync does not include that\u00a0analog functionality.\u00a0 SmartFusion is relatively new, I do not know how popular it is and what additional functionality its end-users are requesting.\u00a0 I believe the acceptance of the SmartFusion device will serve as a early bellwether indicator for the acceptance of Zynq.<\/p>\n

Quicklogic<\/a> started out as a more general purpose programmable logic supplier based on a programming technology similar to antifuse with a low power profile.\u00a0 Over the years, Quicklogic has chosen to focus their offering as more of a programmable application specific standard product<\/a> (ASSP).\u00a0 The devices they offer include specific hard IP tailored to the mobile market\u00a0along with\u00a0a programmable fabric.\u00a0 As a company, their laser focus on mobile applications leaves them as very much a niche player.<\/p>\n

In recent years, a number of startups have entered the marketplace.\u00a0 While one might have thought that they would target the low end and seek to provide “good enough” functionality at a low price in an effort to truly disrupt the market from the bottom, gain a solid foothold\u00a0and sell products to those overserved by what Altera and Xilinx offer; that turns out not to be the case.\u00a0 In fact, two of the new entrants (Tabula and Achronix) are specifically after the high end, high margin sector that Altera and Xilinx so jealously guard.<\/p>\n

The company with the most buzz is Tabula<\/a>.\u00a0 They are headed by former Xilinx executive, Dennis Segers<\/a>, who is widely credited with making the decisions that resulted in\u00a0Xilinx’s stellar growth in the late 1990s with the release of the\u00a0original Virtex<\/a> device. People are hoping for the same magic at Tabula.\u00a0 Tabula’s product offers what they refer to as a SpaceTime Architecture and 3D Programmable Logic<\/a>.\u00a0 Basically what that means is that your design is sectioned and swapped in and out of the device much like a program is swapped in and out of a computer’s RAM space.\u00a0 This provides a higher effective design density on a device having less “hard logic”.\u00a0 An interesting idea.\u00a0 It seems like it would likely utilize less power than\u00a0the full design realized on a single chip.\u00a0\u00a0The cost is complexity of the\u00a0design software and the critical nature of the system setup (i.e., the memory interface and implementation) on the board to ensure the swapping functionality as promised.\u00a0 Is it\u00a0easy to use?\u00a0 Is it worth the hassle?\u00a0 It’s hard to tell right now.\u00a0 There are some early adopters kicking the tires.\u00a0\u00a0If\u00a0Tabula is successful will they be able to expand their market beyond\u00a0where they are now?\u00a0It looks like their technology might scale up very easily to provide higher and higher effective densities.\u00a0 But does their technology scale down to low cost markets easily?\u00a0 It doesn’t look like it.\u00a0 There is a lot of overhead associated with all that image swapping and its value for the low end is questionable.\u00a0 But, I’ll be the first to say:\u00a0I don’t know.<\/p>\n

Achronix<\/a> as best I can tell has staked out the high speed-high density market.\u00a0 That is quite similar to what Tabula is addressing.\u00a0 The key distinction between the two companies (besides Achronix’s lack of Star Trek<\/a>-like marketing terminology) is that Achronix is using Intel<\/a> as their foundry.\u00a0 This might finally put an end to those persistent annual rumors<\/a> that Intel is poised to purchase Altera or Xilinx (is it the same analyst every time<\/a> who leaks this?). \u00a0That Intel relationship and a less complex (than Tabula) fabric technology means that Achronix might be best situated to offer their product\u00a0for those defense applications that require a secure, on-shore foundry.\u00a0 If that is the case, then Achronix is aiming at a select and very profitable sector that neither Altera nor Xilinx will let go without a big fight.\u00a0 Even if successful, where does Achronix expand?\u00a0 Does their technology scale down to low cost markets easily?\u00a0 I don’t think so…but I don’t know.\u00a0 Does it scale up to higher densities easily?\u00a0 Maybe.<\/p>\n

SiliconBlue is taking a different approach.\u00a0 They are aiming at the low power, low cost\u00a0segment.\u00a0 That seems like more of a disruptive play.\u00a0 Should they be able to squeeze in, they might be able to innovate their way up the market and cause some trouble for Xilinx and Altera.\u00a0 The rumored issue with SiliconBlue is that their devices aren’t quite low power enough or quite cheap enough to fit their intended target market.\u00a0 The other rumor is that they are constantly looking for a buyer.\u00a0 That doesn’t instill a high level of confidence now, does it?<\/p>\n

So what does all this mean?\u00a0 The Microsemi SmartFusion device might be that quantum innovative leap\u00a0that most likely extends the programmable logic market space.\u00a0 It may be the one product that has the potential to serve an unserved market and bring more end-user and applications on board.\u00a0 But the power and price point might not be right.<\/p>\n

The ability of any programmable logic solution to expand beyond the typical sweet spots is based on\u00a0its ability to displace other technologies at a lower cost and with sufficient useful functionality.\u00a0 PLDs are competing not just against ASSPs but also against multi-core processors and GPUs<\/a>.\u00a0 Multi-core processors and GPUs offer a simpler programming model (using common programming languages<\/a>), relatively low power and a wealth of application development tools with a large\u00a0pool of able, skilled\u00a0developers.\u00a0 PLDs still require understanding hardware description languages<\/a> (like VHDL<\/a> or Verilog HDL<\/a>)\u00a0as well as\u00a0common programming languages<\/a> (like C<\/a>) in addition to\u00a0specific conceptual knowledge of hardware and software.\u00a0 On top of all that programmable logic often\u00a0delivers higher\u00a0power consumption at a higher price point than competing solutions.<\/p>\n

In the end, the real trick is not just providing a hardware solution that delivers the correct power and price point but a truly integrated tool set that\u00a0leverages the expansive resource pool of\u00a0C programmers rather than the much smaller resource puddle of HDL programmers. And no one, big or small, new or old, is investing in that development effort.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think it’s high time I authored a completely opinion-based article full of observations and my own prejudices that might result in a littany of\u00a0ad hominem attacks\u00a0and insults.\u00a0 Or at least, I hope it does.\u00a0 This little bit of prose will outline my view of the world of programmable logic as I see it today.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,45,42],"tags":[43,44,27,92,38,89],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programmable-logic","category-start-ups","category-systems-on-a-chip","tag-cpu","tag-gpu","tag-hardware","tag-programmable-logic","tag-revolutionary","tag-software"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":825,"href":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions\/825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}