Our last blog item mentioned the ARM TechCon3 conference taking place this week, but there are two other significant conferences going on, Supercomm in Chicago and Milcom in Boston. At both conferences, Altera Corp. is promoting its shipment of Stratix devices with 11-Gbit transceivers. In theory, both target OEM audiences could make equal use of higher-end FPGAs. In practice, the fortunes of the former are more suspect than the mil-aero business, even given the downsizing the latter may experience after the booming Bush years.

The problem all major FPGA players could experience as their devices to serve 10-, 40-, and 100-Gbit Ethernet come to market, is the contraction of potential applications to the enterprise market. Supercomm is a show targeting service providers and the equipment manufacturers who serve them. The landscape is not pretty. Ciena has swallowed up the last remnants of Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks struggle to keep up with new Asian players like Huawei and ZTE, and even the mighty Cisco Systems seems to be playing “anything but telco” these days.  OEMs are particularly worried that major carriers are not participating in the federal broadband stimulus program, which means no switching or routing gravy trains in the near term.

Altera, as well as military specialist Actel, seems to be placing more emphasis on Milcom, with special crypto and signal-processing demonstrations. Even in an era of troop drawdowns, the expansion of FPGA subsystems in UAVs and communication platforms seem to indicate a continuing market.

I’m hoping that products like the Altera Stratix IV GT and Xilinx’s Virtex-6 HXT can find near-term homes in the 10-Gbit network interface cards used in high-performance computing and enterprise server clusters. Not so long ago, I thought they’d show up in metropolitan carrier networks too. But with Supercomm moving to more software and services content, maybe it would behoove FPGA vendors to spend more time at Milcom, as well as enterprise and storage shows. Sometimes it gets hard to remember that a service-provider OEM equipment market even exists.