The eFPGA Market is Heating Up!

It is nice to see an emerging market successfully emerge for a change. With embedded FPGAs we are way past test chips and are now seeing tape-outs and silicon in a variety of applications. I’m not sure what the current market estimate of eFPGA is just yet but they align nicely with the $30B+ micro controller market. Market studies have the MCU market exceeding $100B in 2024 partially due to the exploding IoT segment but also due to the increasing intelligence of automotive products and the need for security in ALL of our semiconductor products, absolutely.

This brings me to the topic at hand which is embedded FPGA pioneer Flex Logic raising $5M in Series B equity financing. The first question I asked was, “Why only $5M?” The answer of course is “Because that is all we need.” Boom… mic drop.

Here are quotes and some meat from the press release. As a receiver of MANY press releases I have to say Flex Logix releases are very informative:

“We believe that Flex Logix’s embedded FPGA has the potential to be as pervasive as ARM’s embedded processors have become today,” said Peter Hebert, Managing Partner at Lux Capital. “The company’s software and silicon are proven and in use at multiple customers, paving the way to become one of the most widely-used chip building blocks across many markets and for a broad range of applications.”

With readily-available, high-density blocks of programmable RTL in any size and with the features a customer needs, designers now have the powerful flexibility to customize a single chip for multiple markets and/or upgrade the chip while in the system to adjust to changing standards such as networking protocols. Customers can also easily update their chips with the latest deep learning algorithms and/or implement their own versions of protocols in data centers. In the past, the only way to accomplish these updates was through expensive and time-consuming new mask versions of the same chip.

“The Flex Logix platform is the best, most scalable and flexible embedded FPGA solution on the market today, delivering significant competitive advantages in time to market, engineering efficiency, minimum metal layers and high density,” said Pierre Lamond, Partner at Eclipse Ventures.

“These patented technology breakthroughs combined with an experienced management team led by Geoff Tate, the founding CEO of Rambus, strongly position the company for rapid growth in the future.” “We now have customers with working silicon, multiple licensees and are seeing our first repeat designs,” said Tate, CEO of Flex Logix. “With a large number of customers in active, detailed evaluation of our technology for a wide range of applications, we expect significant growth of our customer base in the near term. As a result, we’re staffing up ‘ahead of the curve’ to ensure we can satisfy the demand.“

About the Flex Logix Embedded FPGA Platform
Addressing a wide range of chips in multiple markets, the Flex Logix EFLX™ platform can be used with networking chips with reconfigurable protocols, datacenter chips with reconfigurable accelerators, deep learning chips with real-time upgradeable algorithms, base stations chips with customizable features for multiple markets, MCU/IoT chips with flexible I/O and accelerators, and aerospace/defense applications including rad-hard embedded FPGA. EFLX is available for the most popular process nodes already and is being ported to additional process nodes based on customer demand.

About Flex Logix
Flex Logix, founded in March 2014, provides solutions for reconfigurable RTL in chip and system designs using embedded FPGA IP cores and software. The company’s technology platform delivers significant customer benefits by dramatically reducing design and manufacturing risks, accelerating technology roadmaps, and bringing greater flexibility to customers’ hardware. Flex Logix has raised more than $12 million of venture capital. It is headquartered in Mountain View, California and has sales rep offices in China, Europe, Israel, Japan, Taiwan and Texas. More information can be obtained at http://www.flex-logix.com or follow on Twitter at @efpga.

Also read: CEO Interview: Geoff Tate of Flex Logix

You can read more about Flex Logix on SemiWiki HERE.