The AMD acquisition of Xilinx is certainly big news but as an insider looking at the media coverage I think there are a few more points to consider. While most of the coverage has been positive there will always be negatives and we can look at that as well.
Intel acquired Altera in 2015 for $16.7B at a 50% premium which was a major disruption… Read More
A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can implement arbitrary digital logic, anything from a microprocessor to a video generator or crypto miner. An FPGA consists of many logic blocks, each typically consisting of a flip flop and a logic function, along with a routing network that connects the logic blocks. What makes an FPGA… Read More
I’ll never forget first learning about Xilinx when they got started back in 1984, because the concept of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) was so simple and elegant, it was rows and columns of logic gates that a designer could program to perform any logic function, then connect that logic to IO pads to drive other chips … Read More
ANSYS is the world leader in engineering simulation across multiple markets. One of those markets just happens to be semiconductor which is why ANSYS is on SemiWiki.com. Due to the pandemic ANSYS has transformed their popular live regional events to one broad virtual event “Simulation World”.
“Simulation World is world’s largest… Read More
Unfortunately, I missed this event since I was in China. Fortunately, Manoj Roge VP Strategic Planning and Business Development at Achronix participated and did a nice write-up. Manoj has more than 20 years of experience in the programable business with Cypress Semiconductor, Xilinx, Altera, and now Achronix so you should definitely… Read More
In 1990 Xilinx notified us that they believed Actel was infringing a patent that had just been issued to them. My immediate thoughts – the patent system is all screwed up! Actel had been developing our product for five years. We had been shipping it for a year and a half. During all that time, we were totally unaware that there was … Read More
The foundry problem continued to plague us at Actel. We had a really complex process! But —- we needed state of the art feature sizes if we were to compete with Xilinx. TI and Matsushita had been doing a good job for us, but not in fabs with state of the art technology. We were two process generations behind! At two generations… Read More
By the late 80s it had become clear to me that the Japanese were right. Memories, Microprocessors, and Gate Arrays (As well as ASICs) were what customers wanted then. “Building blocks of ever-increasing complexity” was obsolete. What next? Should I try to become an overnight networking expert? Maybe a DSP expert? Pretty… Read More
We all know (I hope) that security is important so we’re willing to invest time and money in this area but there are a couple of problems. First there’s no point in making your design secure if it’s not competitive and making it competitive is hard enough, so the great majority of resource and investment is going to go into that objective.… Read More
In 2015 Intel acquired Altera for $16.7B changing one of the most heated rivalries (Xilinx vs Altera) the fabless semiconductor ecosystem has ever seen. Prior to the acquisition the FPGA market was fairly evenly split between Xilinx and Altera with Lattice and Actel playing to market niches in the shadows. There were also two FPGA… Read More
