FPGA vendors mine specific niches

Anthony Cataldo, EE Times
(10/24/2005 9:00 AM EDT)
 
San Jose, Calif. — Two stalwarts in field-programmable gate arrays are looking to capitalize on growing niches that show signs of eventually becoming mainstream applications for FPGAs.

With its latest serial transceiver-based FPGA, the Stratix II GX, Altera Corp. is narrowing the range of communications protocols its FPGAs will support, while Xilinx Inc. is stepping up to address high-performance digital signal processing. Both San Jose companies hope to capture the interest of designers looking to do more-sophisticated system designs with FPGAs.