An FPGA startup in 2009?

April 20, 2009

Peter Clarke at EE Times tells us this week that the French company formerly known as M2000 will be launching low-power 65-nm FPGAs in May, under the new name of Abound Logic Inc. When Abound moved its headquarters from Blevres, France to Santa Clara, Calif. in 2007, it also shifted from a strategy of licensing IP to marketing its own FPGAs under the name of Raptor.

Abound is not saying how it achieves a claimed 50 percent reduction in power dissipation from competing 65-nm designs, but the fact that co-founder and CEO Frederic Reblewski has roots in Meta Systems SA and Mentor Graphics Corp., would suggest that Raptor might rely on a unique circuit design to achieve its power breakthroughs.

Despite the graveyard of hopeful FPGA startups that lost funding since the start of the millennium,this column predicted at the end of 2008 that, no matter how bad conditions were, the Xilinx-Altera-Actel-Lattice Big Four might face some new competition emerging in 2009. We still must see if Tier Logic launches an anticipated product this year, for example.

Emergence from the recession may provide new opportunities for FPGA startups, but they still must overcome a big hurdle: as innovative designs move to 65 and 45 nm, foundry relations become key, and innovations must be significant enough to woo customers from the known players. Will the newcomers bring something truly differentiated to the table? And can their funding last through the current brutal economic environment? At least we know that 2009 no longer will be the predictable year some may have anticipated.

Posted by FPGA Gurus on April 20, 2009 | Comments (8)

April 16, 2010

In response to: An FPGA startup in 2009?
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September 24, 2009

In response to: An FPGA startup in 2009?
BobUrUncle commented:

Altera and Xilinx are choking the industry with their patents. Thankfully most should be expiring soon. They've kept prices too high on the larger parts making GPUs more attactive for high performance computing. When they get the prices down to ~$100 for 10million gates, then we'll see some serious volumes in HPC as co-processors in servers. Until then A&X have gotten lazy collecting fat margins in aerospace and telecom.

May 21, 2009

In response to: An FPGA startup in 2009?
Tough industry commented:

It's a very very very mature industry, there should be some breakthrough innovations coming up but as to now, i don't see any company have a potential to catch up A-X

April 30, 2009

In response to: An FPGA startup in 2009?
Payday Loans Canada commented:

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April 27, 2009

In response to: An FPGA startup in 2009?
viswambharan commented:

There is only a duo-poly: Xilinx and Altera. The rest are just bringing up the rear.

April 27, 2009

In response to: An FPGA startup in 2009?
viswambharan commented:

Customers have to be sure that these companies will be around in the long run, since their products have to be in the field for 5-10 years. It's a Catch-22 death gap that very few companies have the resources to survive. Their best bet is to be bought out by the competition.

April 27, 2009

In response to: An FPGA startup in 2009?
XYZ commented:

Let's see how good their P&R software is. In the FPGA/ASIC space it all comes down to P&R tools. I'm guessing they'll use Synopsys DC shell or Synplicity initially.

April 23, 2009

In response to: An FPGA startup in 2009?
Aurash commented:

I came across an ad in electronic design magazine about a FPGA which they claim is three times faster then any FPGA ever released, quite suprised I have to say, and skeptical in the same time, but I did research on the net and it seems to be a company with many talented peoples some of them which are former Xilinx employees, the name of the company is Achronix and are based in Silicon Valley, worth to have a look on their web page.

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