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It’s official: Tier Logic will cease to be in business on Friday July 16, 2010. The company has been trying to close its second round of funding, but it became clear last week that no short-term funding from a new VC would come, despite some due diligence by two lead investors. [...] Continue reading RIP Tier Logic Xilinx announced that it signed a multi-year strategic licensing agreement to use Oasys’ synthesis. What does that mean for the FPGA and EDA community? Oasys’ product, RealTime Designer, is claimed to be 10x-60x faster than the competition. Among other things, it uses AIG-based optimization. This technology [...] Continue reading Who should worry about Xilinx and Oasys partnership? Another FPGA startup met the fate of so many others: Abound Logic is reported to have shut down this week, Wednesday June 2nd, 2010. Abound logic, previously known as M2000, was founded by three EDA veterans who had previously started Meta Systems. Meta Systems developed the industry’s first emulation system based on custom FPGAs, which [...] Continue reading RIP Abound Logic A FPGA company makes revenue with the hardware: it sells its device, and gives away its design tools –synthesis, place-and-route. Yet the EDA industry has had success with its own (non-free) FPGA synthesis solutions. For good reasons: in its days, Synplicity’s Synplify was the best FPGA synthesis out there. Synopsys acquired Synplicity [...] Continue reading Is FPGA a sustainable market for EDA? The past two weeks were pretty interesting if you follow FPGAs. Yes, Xilinx and Altera kept upping their target to Wall St., but that is not where the excitement came from. It came from the recent announcements of two startups, both created in 2003 and heavily funded. Tabula released its long-awaited device, which goes [...] Continue reading Can Tabula and Tier Logic be successful? ICCAD’09 was a fairly good vintage. It started Monday morning with an excellent keynote from Hamid Pirahesh about cloud computing. The same day in the afternoon, a more EDA-focused discussion was initiated by Jim Hogan and Paul McLellan (slides can be found here), asking the question “What EDA needs to change for [...] Continue reading What EDA needs to change for 2020 success? October 30th, 2009 | Tags: Altera, Business, FPGA, India, outsourcing, software, Xilinx | Category: Business
Last week I wrote a post discussing Xilinx and Altera Q3’09 results, and I mentioned Xilinx’ operation margin consistently trailing Altera’s by 3-4%. I had a few emails regarding that gap, and why that gap would be closed eventually. Let me address this topic with this post. Comparing the yearly fiscal exercises directly would be biased [...] Continue reading How can Xilinx improve its bottom line Functional verification is a major bottleneck in the chip design cycle. Any misstep in closing the functional correctness of a digital system costs millions of dollars in redesign, additional testing, and silicon respins. One can argue at length about its actual cost, but people in the industry usually agree that functional verification takes between [...] Continue reading The formal verification market is still untapped This week Xilinx and Altera released their September results (Q2FY10 and Q3FY09 respectively). The bottom line is shown below (all numbers in $M). Source: Xilinx and Altera financial reports, and Yahoo! Finance Xilinx’ quarterly income of $64M (0.23$/share) beats Wall Street’s expectation of 0.19$/share. Altera’s quarterly income of $56.7M (0.19$/share) meets Wall [...] Continue reading What to read in Xilinx’ and Altera’s third quarter results The FPGA market has been entrenched in a duopoly for a number of years now. In 2008, according to Gartner Inc., Xilinx Inc. and Altera Corp. hold together 87% of the market of programmable logic (51.2% and 35.5% respectively). The rest of the market is covered mostly by Actel Corp. and Lattice Semiconductor Corp., about 6% [...] Continue reading Why FPGA startups keep failing |
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