Motorola blends FPGA, ColdFire technologies

Electronic News, Feb 16, 1998

Phoenix, Ariz.--Following a failed attempt to bring field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to the mainstream market, Motorola's Programmable Products Sector will begin today its second shift away from the mainstream market and into niche reconfigurable FPGAs.

What Motorola is calling the Core technology will feature standard diffused components plus programmable logic on a single silicon substrate. Motorola's first reconfigurable chip will integrate the ColdFire processor core with Motorola's FPGA technology on a single chip. Motorola claims the Core technology will enable designers to achieve a system gate density twice that of any FPGA technology while allowing for reconfigurability.

"I think this is a good move for Motorola because I doubt if anyone really believed they would make it in the mainstream market again," said Jerry Worchel, senior analyst at Scottsdale, Ariz.--based market research firm In-Stat. Like many mainstream semiconductor vendors, including Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, Motorola struggled to compete in the intensely competitive programmable logic segment.

"This will give them the in-system reprogrammability and reusability that is becoming more popular. This way they can concentrate on their core businesses while adding value to enhance profitability; much better than moving into a business where 80 percent of the market is control by four companies," Mr. Worchel added.

According to Ron Lipinski, director of operations for Motorola's programmable products sector, Motorola would consider getting back into the standard FPGA business if it developed a product that would be overwhelming in the marketplace. Until that happens, the company plans to focus on the Core family and the line of analog FPGAs introduced last year (EN, May 12, 1997). "We entered into the FPGA business quite a few years later than most of the other competitors and so we would have to chase them down if we wanted to compete," said Mr. Lipinski. "We needed a way to differentiate from them and so we decided to focus on this technology along with the analog FPGAs."

Motorola said it plans to roll out the initial ColdFire FPGA, dubbed the MPACF250, in 3Q98 priced at approximately $50. The MPACF250 features a 54MHz ColdFire 32-bit RISC processor with a memory-saving, variable length instruction set. Mr. Lipinski said Motorola plans to integrate embedded FPGA with more powerful ColdFire processors, as well as with the MCore, PowerPC and HD12 processors. "We are still committed to this business. We are now just focusing on a different market than most of the traditional FPGA competition," he added.

Mr. Lipinski said the Core will not compete directly with the other FPGAs because it will replace two chips in these applications--the programmable parts and the processor--rather than just the FPGA. "By putting these giant functions into the FPGA we are able to hit a lot of applications not normally hit by PLDs," said Mr. Lipinski. "The device will find its way into thousands of other applications across the automotive and telecom industries," he said.