HBA Looks to FIFO Market: Standard-cell design, UMC fab will take share from IDT, Cypress

Electronic News, Dec 17, 2001 by Gale Morrison

First In First Out. FIFO. It's the oldest of computer science principles and among the oldest types of semiconductor memory.

Whether it's the down market or relative lack of competition in the space, or some other unidentified reason, companies are getting excited again about FIFO. IDT Inc. has re-emphasized it with the launch of its TeraSync line, sampling now, and Cypress Semiconductor Corp., after a recent reorganization, kept it as central to its business. The two companies design and produce FIFOs in-house and hold about 70 percent of the roughly $400 million-a-year market, with only four others picking up the rest, said Eric Mantion, senior networking analyst at Cahners In-Stat group. In-Stat is owned by Cahners Business Information, the parent company of Electronic News.

But somebody means to shake up the FIFO market. D.K. Cheng and his company, High Bandwidth Access Inc. (HBA) of San Jose, are currently sampling to customers the FlexQ line of FIFO devices, and HBA will roll out the successor IntelligentQ line in mid-2002.

President and CEO Cheng said HBA has assembled a strong team of ASIC designers which is going to bring higher bandwidth, faster I/O and less power consumption to the full-custom design world IDT and Cypress have stayed in. Using the standard-cell, ASIC approach has brought HBA lots of EDA attention, from the angel investors he can't name to the EDA companies that have been supporting the team.

"FIFO's functionality is well known and mature," Cheng said. "The difficulty is how to make it faster and to make the memory-buffer higher density. You need non-blocking access." Cheng adds that only a dedicated FIFO, which telecommunications and data communications systems use lots of, can get the job done. An FPGA or SRAM approach is too complex and too expensive.

And, he said, you won't find FIFOs falling prey to the great integration march, as serializer/deserializer functionality is, for instance.

"A small FIFO could be integrated into an ASIC or FPGA," Cheng said. "But for large ones such as our FlexQ III, the memory size is big. It doesn't economically make sense because of the die size and yield issues."

Cheng said starting in FIFOs will give HBA excellent footing for a leap into key, very large networking markets.

"Switching and queuing is the core technology of networking. We're going to integrate the peripheral networking functions into this kind of switching and queuing technology.

"We can make n high-performance switch very easily. We'll integrate the MAC layer and very easily make a Gigabit Ethernet switch. If we integrate the framer and mapper function, we [HBA] can become a high-performance switching chip used in SONET applications, or for switching from one traffic mode to the other, say from SONET to ATM or from IP to SONET," Cheng said. This is the company's road map.

But first, the FIFO market, which Cheng acknowledged is not going to be that easy to crack. And he hasn't gotten IDT's and Cypress' attention yet, either. Spokesmen from both companies said they did not know enough about HBA to speak on the topic of competition with them.

"The major issue of FIFOs is they have 200 different parts. For a newcomer it's very tough," Cheng said. "They have 200 different parts, and none of them is a major revenue generator. If you just divide the number of parts by revenue, each part is 0.5 percent of revenue. (The) real number may change -- one is 2 percent, 5 percent -- but the issue is the same.

"If a competitor wants to do this kind of device, it's hard to shake IDT's marketplace. Just like Analog Devices, they have 2,000 parts. It's hard to steal market share from them," Cheng said.

Cheng said HBA can offer 100 to 150 types of FIFOs. "I won't say we cover 100 percent of the market, but most of the popular lines we do cover." Cheng promises a new HBA FIFO product every quarter in 2002, including an HSTL (high-speed transistor logic) and a FlexQ IV that will compete with IDT's TeraSync, he said.

"Our performance, our speed is like 250MHz, at least," Cheng said. "This one new product, for the HSTL I/O, right now is getting very popular, especially in the high-speed datacom area." Next up after these two, Cheng said, is a double data rate DRAM-based FIFO in memory densities of 40Mbits."