Structured-ASIC faithful plan their next moves

By Mike Clendenin
April 24, 2006

Taipei, Taiwan -- While a few of the structured-ASIC market's key players have retreated, others in the field say they are primed for the long haul and may soon pick up the pace.

Lightspeed Semiconductor was first to fall by the wayside, saying it would exit the market for structured ASICs after several years of R&D. Lightspeed is betting its future instead on intellectual property. Next to leave was LSI Logic Corp., which halted development of its RapidChip ASIC platform in a restructuring that focuses on high-volume storage and consumer apps. Soon after, EDA vendor Synplicity threw in the towel, citing LSI's pullout as a factor.

With all that negative activity, some remaining players are working to reassure customers that a domino effect isn't in the offing. Faraday Technology went so far as to issue a statement saying it had "invested carefully" and was "reaping excellent returns" from its structured-ASIC line, which comprises a network communications platform and a PC-oriented peripherals platform.

Indeed, after taking in about $30 million between those two lines, the company is releasing another this week called Template. The first product, FIT-18, has almost a million gates of customer logic design capacity, 80 kbytes of on-chip SRAM (single- and dual-port) and 400 I/O pins, of which 98 can be con- figured for PCI/PCI-X interfaces. Other on-chip functions include PLL, DLL and power-on-reset.

The company has also promised to double its offering of structured ASICs by year's end, introducing follow-ups to its NetComposer and PeripheralComposer products as well as Template. In short, Faraday isn't flustered by one of the market leaders packing it in.

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