Why Firms Fail At FPGA

The fallers at the FPGA fence are a roll-call of the industry’s finest: Intel, TI, Motorola, IBM, Philips, Toshiba and AMD.

20 years ago, Raul Sud,  the founder and CEO of Lattice Semiconductor, told me shy they had all failed.

“Most managements who have tried to do FPGA wanted to do it quickly,” said Sud, “they’ve said: ‘Let’s take a licence’, so they’ve taken a licence,and got a mask-set and a software tool-set and, and run wafers and got into the business and, after six months, along comes a software update and they’re in trouble. Because they don’t have a deep understanding.”

”There’s no such thing as a quick entry; no such thing as a quick understanding.” He said.

“There is a common thread why they all failed,” concluded Sud, “they all grossly underestimated the software challenge. Primarily FPGA is a software challenge not a hardware challenge. To succeed in FPGA you need to set up on the model of an EDA company not a silicon company. You need to start with customers’ software requirements and the third party interfaces needed, not by designing a piece of silicon.”


Comments

One comment

  1. Daniel J Wisehart

    I think you mean “told me why”, not “told me shy.”

  2. Interesting to see top 2 FPGA companies are taken by silicon driven company. Let’s us see how they want to achieve the market growth ..

  3. Good point. But also an important issue is the easy of deployment and integration with widely used software. Even if you develop the most sophisticated FPGA, if you don’t provide an integrated framework that will allow easy deployment and integration with software tools nobody will use it.

    FPGA vendors need to provide the required framework that allows C/C++, python and Java developer to utilize FPGAs as easy as any CPU/GPU.

    This is the reason why at inaccel we provide a complete framework for easy deployment, scaling and resource management of FPGAs for software developers.

  4. That is quite amusing coming from Lattice back then. I was having to use one of their devices having picked up a design from a different company who couldn’t finish it. The Lattice software wasn’t much different (in fact thinking about it it might have been worse) than Altera / Intel IPLS back in the 1980s.

    When I met the Lattice rep at one point he started complaining bitterly. “Our Devices are better. Altera have only got where they are today because of their great design software.”

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