Is the FPGA industry cannibalizing itself?

Hi folks, I just filed a feature on the low cost FPGA offerings from the various FPGA vendors, and I’m pretty happy with the article. The article focuses on how the low cost FPGA space is turning into the new battleground for FPGA vendors. Don’t know if you know this or not but Bryan Lewis over at research firm Gartner predicts that FPGA industry revenue will actually dip 1.9% in 2007. I cover FPGAs but I don’t cover the FPGA industry per se (don’t closely track earnings) so this info was a bit surprising.

It turns out that that the FPGA industry is experiencing a bit of its own karma. What, you say? Remember how forever the FPGA guys have been bragging about how they are taking sockets, share and thus revenue away from the ASIC guys. Well it turns out that the small guys in the FPGA space have put so much advanced functionality in low cost FPGAs (and the big guys are too), they are starting to take sockets normally filled by more expensive high end FPGAs, which previously had displaced ASICs. (I can faintly hear Wilf Corrigan laughing…nah, that must be the wind).

Lewis says this dip in 2007 isn’t entirely due to FPGA cannibalism.

He says that in 2007, the  FPGA industry is experiencing “the perfect storm”— inventory issues, customer consolidation as well as pricing issues.

On a positive note, he predicts the industry will come roaring back in 2008 and experience 14.4% revenue growth to reach $4. 091B in 2008 over $3.575B in 2007. Lewis hasn’t released his report for 2008 but it will be interesting to see what exactly is going to change to drive it up 14.4%. Keep this in mind, the little vendors are doing damage and they haven’t even released the 65nm versions of their low cost chips yet.

At any rate, my feature will go into a lot more detail about what’s what in the low cost FPGA segment and I’m going to include an online spec sheet covering the various low cost FPGA offerings from vendors like Actel, Altera, Lattice and Xilinx. You can imagine it isn’t an easy task to get these guys to convert their various logic structures to plain old ASIC gates…it’s like getting a straight answer out of a law student.

The article will appear in the November 8 issue of EDN. I hope you find it interesting and useful.