Altera-Xilinx battle shifts to price arena

Electronic News, June 30, 1997 by Peter Brown

Altera will today slash the prices on its Flex 10K and Max 7000S families of complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs) by as much as 49 percent. At the same time, the company will lay out a roadmap that will include planned priced reductions that company officials said will bring the cost of 5,000 gates down to around $1 by the turn of the century. Simultaneously, Xilinx also will announce up to a 30 percent price reduction for its XC9500 family of CPLDs to take effect in August of this year.

Altera's EPF10K50V 0.35-micron 50,000-gate device, which was priced at $195 in 100-unit quantities, is now priced at $99 in 100-unit quantities--a 49 percent reduction. The entire Flex 10K family has been reduced except for the EPF10K130V which, according to Erik Cleage, Altera's VP of marketing, will be reduced in price later this year. Altera's Max 7000S series has also been reduced--including the EPM7064S 64 macrocell device previously priced at $9.70 in 100-unit quantities--now priced at $5 each in 100-unit quantities--a reduction of 48 percent.

"We were able to achieve these reductions through process technology migration, lower cost packaging and Altera's redundancy technology," Mr. Cleage told Electronic News. "We predict that in four years the EPF10K100, our 100,000-gate device, will be reduced by 94 percent to $20 in OEM quantities."

Altera also provided a product roadmap stretching until the year 2000, predicting that 5,000 gates of logic will cost a user $1, Altera products manufactured on a 0.18 process will be in full production and the company will breach the 1 million gate PLD barrier, Mr. Cleage said.

Meanwhile, Xilinx's is planning to reduce the tag on its XC9500 family by up to 30 percent in August of this year, including the XC95216 that was priced at $48.50 and is slated to drop to $33.95 in August--a reduction of 30 percent.

"Xilinx and Altera are the two top companies in the industry and there is always going to be an intense competition when there is only two," said Rhondalee Rohleder, president of Pace Technologies. "Part of this is the fact that Altera is closing the gap in revenues between Xilinx and itself. You know that Altera is very interested in becoming the number one vendor and Xilinx is very interested in staying in the number one slot. It's going to be very competitive from here on out."

With both companies vying for the number one spot, 1997 has seen a vast programmable logic battle between Xilinx and Altera covering numerous programmable logic markets.

This last week has been the hottest of the year, however, with the announcement of the price reductions by both companies today and last week's gate array replacement battle. Going forward, Altera is boasting it will have a 250,000-gate device shipping by the end of the year and Xilinx plans on introducing a 0.25-micron FPGA family by the end of the year. Both plan on introducing IP cores and adding to their third party IP program as well as offering enhanced speed and performance grades on existing products. Grab hold, the battle is only beginning.