Time-to-market drives design

Electronic News, Jan 5, 1998 by Peter Brown

Mountain View, Calif.--Of the many programmable logic device (PLD) moves last year--including the development of million-gate PLDs, achieving price parity with low density gate arrays and the proliferation of intellectual property (IP) cores--one emerging concept has especially excited the imagination of the industry: the idea of porting a field programmable gate array (FPGA) as a core in a standard cell, thereby creating a programmable ASIC.

While only a few companies have plans to roll out an entire programmable ASIC offering, some are opting to create an FPGA core and then license it to an ASIC partner. In 1998, trends such as a continued drive toward price parity with gate arrays, larger and faster devices and a heavy shift to integrate IP cores into PLDs all have the backing of multiple companies. However, FPGA cores are a mixed bag.

Industry leaders say what will drive this market in the coming year is what has driven the PLD market since its beginning: time-to-market. If an ASIC has a programmable part integrated on-chip, proponents argue that design times might be faster. However, this is the same premise that critics of this technology use to argue why it won't work. FPGA cores integrated into ASICs would have to be so complex that time-to-market would be prolonged rather than shortened. In any event, with PLD growth patterns predicted by many to climb in the coming year to their previous lofty levels of 30 percent growth per year, new investments and technologies will be needed to keep sales rolling, they say.

Market Rebound

After less than stellar results in the last two quarters of 1997, the PLD and ASIC industries are forecasted to grow again in 1998. Although sales of gate arrays and simple PLDs (SPLDs) will decline slightly, standard cells and high density PLDs (HDPLDs) (including FPGAs and complex PLDs) will once again be one of the fastest growing markets in the electronics industry.

Market research firm In-Stat predicts the total growth of the logic market--including standard cells, gate arrays, PLDs and embedded arrays--to exceed 22.4 percent. In-stat also predicts the PLD market will hit $2.6 billion in 1998. FPGAs utilized as cores in standard cells will be a minimal revenue generator at best, according to Jerry Worchel, senior analyst at In-Stat.

Dataquest predicts the HDPLD market will grow 33 percent next year to approximately $2.8 billion. Dataquest also forecasts standard cell sales will grow 33 percent next year to $12.8 billion while gate arrays will continue their downward spiral, shrinking one percent.

Late in 1996, Actel and Lucent Technologies separately said they would begin exploring programmable ASIC technology (EN, Oct. 21, Nov. 4, 1996). Although both companies planned for 1998 to be the year when these hybrid devices would become a money maker for them, Actel pushed back the delivery date of its system PGAs (SPGAs) to 1Q98 for initial product samples (EN, Oct. 20, 1997). Actel also said it would begin looking for an ASIC partner that would ostensibly license its hybrid technology as a core.

Lucent recently said it is on schedule for its hybrid devices--what the company calls field programmable system chips (FPSCs)--and already has the programmable logic portion of the device finished. It is on schedule to deliver these devices in 1Q98 as well.

Atmel in 4Q97 delivered its own plans to create an FPGA core to license to ASIC and digital signal processor (DSP) companies (EN, Oct. 13, 1997). This created a different type of hybrid device and launched Atmel into the IP licensing realm. Atmel said it may sell its devices into this hybrid FPGA market; however, its plans currently are to license the FPGA cores to other companies.

Most recently PLD market heavyweight Xilinx said it was looking into licensing its Virtex FPGA technology to ASIC vendors as a core. QuickLogic has also expressed interest in this hybrid technology

In-Stat's Mr. Worchel said he expects to see multiple partnerships between ASIC and PLD companies very soon, since companies like LSI Logic, VLSI Technology and NEC Electronics have been looking for a PLD offering for their ASIC portfolios for some time now.

"I would think that a traditional ASIC company would want a PLD offering because then they can offer reprogrammability to their customers," said Mr. Worchel. "Programmable logic companies would get an ASIC library and be able to port the ASIC cores to their devices."

Jordan Selburn, analyst at San Jose, Calif.-based market research firm Dataquest, agrees. "I think we will see some announcements next year but I am sure it will be a while before we see any kind of technology from them. There are a lot of rumors about programmable logic companies talking to ASIC vendors and I think Lucent would be a natural to adopt this type of technology. But I don't think we will see much growth or revenue from it, at least not this year."

John East, president and CEO of Actel, has a different opinion. He said that an impact won't be felt in terms of 1998 dollars, but the importance will be the effect on the market in general. "If you look at boards today, microprocessors and memories are all on there but more and more you see the market changing and demanding to have some sort of programmable block to make things easier to do," he said. "The best way to look at it is to envision programmable blocks becoming cells like memories or processors. We will see standard cells offer these type of FPGA blocks and we will see it next year."