Just an hour spent with Roland Triffaux of Xilinx, and one realises why this company has accelerated from ‘another’ start-up in 1984 to market leadership in the area of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), with a revenue in the last financial year which exceeded $1 billion.
Triffaux, now Vice President, Sales & Marketing for Europe, Middle East and Africa, was an early member of the corporation and his knowledge of silicon-based devices is more than comprehensive. With only 2000 employees the annual revenue of Xilinx equates to some $500 000 per person, an incredible figure in terms of the South African economy and one of the highest in the electronics industry worldwide. Needless to say, Xilinx invests a substantial portion of this back into new product development, significantly more than its competitors, so as to retain its leadership position.
Xilinx was a corporation with a difference when it started operations in California's Silicon Valley, as it was the first Fabless company. Well in advance of the modern trend to focus on core competencies and outsource all other requirements, Xilinx focused on its core strengths of R&D, marketing and application engineering. It was so successful in its approach, which saw it introduce the first FPGA in 1985, that it has created solid partnerships with the largest and most successful corporations, which today include IBM and the United Microelectronics Company (UMC). Similarly, on the sales side the association has right from the beginning been with Avnet, who today have dedicated design-in resource for the Xilinx product range. As a company, Xilinx sees this distribution channel as being right for it and its customers, and virtually 90% of its business is carried out in this way. Supply logistics is seen as the forté of the likes of Avnet, while Xilinx itself keeps the customers technologically empowered through on-line support services.
The development of the FPGA since its invention has been in line with what Intel has been doing with computer memory chips. Since 1991 the capacity of the upper-end FPGA has increased 45 times and its speed 12 times, while the cost of the high volume lower-end products has decreased by two orders of magnitude since 1992. At the high end of the market Xilinx now offers its Virtex series which is on a par with the most advanced microprocessors with up to three million gates on the standard device and ten million expected with the introduction of the Virtex-II in late 2000 on 0,15 µm technology.
Xilinx specifically developed the Spartan series of FPGAs as a high volume solution for ASIC replacement. Despite the low cost, up to 100 000 gates are currently available in this range with speeds over 100 MHz, and projections are that the Spartan will offer 250 000 system gates at the end of this year at a cost of less than $10 per device. The Spartan products already offer all of the advantages of re-programmability at the price of ASICs in large volume.
Now that it has consolidated its position as the number one supplier of programmable logic devices, a key objective of Xilinx is to capture a larger share of the application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) market which was estimated to be worth $13bn in 1999. Its product families with major advantages in price and versatility seem set to do just that, and while Triffaux did not say that the traditional ASIC market is dead, the forensic evidence shows that it is in a critical condition. New fabrication technologies, including sub micron and larger wafer sizes are seeing the NRE costs escalate to levels where returns on ASICs requires even higher volume sales and makes production of low-tech devices unsustainable.
In regard to its advantages as a fixed chip ASIC replacement, the FPGA allows for faster time to market for a new device, and all the revenue and other advantages that go with being first! However, because the FPGA is reprogrammable, and capacity for upgrades can be built in at the design stage, the devices are relatively immune from evolving standards, thus extending the product life cycle. Internet reconfigurable logic (IRL) is also now a reality and is being used by customers in the telecommunications business for applications such as network routers, ATM switches and cellular basestations. The advantages of IRL where remote devices can be reconfigured and upgraded virtually instantaneously are huge, and this must be the way forward in an industry such as telecommunications where changes in technology are so rapid.
Xilinx aggressively expanded its CPLD (complex programmable logic device) family following its acquisition of Philips Semiconductors' CoolRunner technology during 1999. The CoolRunner family is unique in that it runs on considerably less power than any similar device on the market and is thus highly appropriate for use in any mobile application. The low power consumption (zero in standby mode) also eliminates the need for costly heat- sinks and decreases the size and cost of power components. Triffaux believes that this advanced product was unsuccessful for Philips not because of technology, where it is unequalled, but because Philips tried to price it as a premium product. In line with its strategy of meeting the needs of the mass market, Xilinx prices the CoolRunner only marginally higher than its other range of CPLDs.
The beauty of the CPLD is that while it is an off-the-shelf component, it can be customised by the designer to provide the desired functionality. While it is a complex device, designing them in can be simple, particularly with all the on-line tools and software available from Xilinx. Because the CPLD (unlike a custom ASIC) is re-programmable, the designer can rapidly and inexpensively change the design right up to the point where the device enters production. Even then the application is upgradable as products can easily be modified using ISP over the Internet. One of the pertinent examples given by Triffaux is an answer of how to deal with the increasing number of mobile phone standards. In principle you could have a single handset, and using a CPLD you could download what you need at the time, be it GSM, CDMA or other third-generation technology. Of course all this could all be done by service providers in a way which is effectively transparent to the user.
In order to convert an idea into reality on a CPLD Xilinx provides all the answers with its WebPACK tool which enables customers to download free CPLD software from the Xilinx website straight onto their desktop. Introduced in 1999 more than 10 000 designers (and probably competitors) have already downloaded this software which is continuously enhanced. The software includes modules for synthesis, simulation, fitting (to an actual device) and programming. Having developed the CPLD using the downloadable tools one can even order the product over the Internet - South African customers being redirected to Avnet Kopp for rapid response. The latest upgrade to the software, WebPACK ISE, was released as recently as 14 September this year. (http://www.xilinx.com/products/software/webpowered.htm)
Triffaux really buzzes when he gets into the topic of ASICs versus the Xilinx family of FPGAs. As wafer technology moves further and further into the sub-micron region (the company produced its first 0,18 æm devices during 1999), the production cost per device function is decreased dramatically, but the fixed costs (the so-called NRE or nonrecoverable engineering) and the ASIC minimum quantity increase exponentially. Xilinx itself (in collaboration with UMC) is in the process of changing from the now standard 8" wafer to the massive 12", which implies more than twice the number of devices per wafer. These make up costs are equally applicable to the Xilinx FPGAs, but of course in this case are recovered against thousands of customers, not one! One interesting point raised by Triffaux is that the 0,18 mm technology already requires masks which have a dimension less than the wavelength of the krypton fluoride laser used in the process, namely 248 nm. The diffraction effects caused under this situation require what is referred to as optical proximity correction, which basically means that the mask shape must become increasingly complex even for relatively simple patterns.
Xilinx has customers that encompass many global 'Blue Chip' companies, including Boeing, Cisco, Ericsson, Hitachi, IBM, Rockwell International and Texas Instruments to name but a few. The most recent market breakdown indicates that telecommunications applications dominate, contributing to 72% of the revenue of Xilinx, followed a long way off by computing at 22%. This is not a reflection of the lack of applications in the computing area, but is an indication of a world trend where the telecommunications and networking market is booming.
The Xilinx mission revolves around the three pillars of its strength, silicon, software and support, a model which has proved more appropriate in a high-tech business than the traditional textbook Ps of price, place and people. The company is also a strong believer in riding the wave of Moore's Law which predicted that density and performance will continue to improve and favours the FPGA solution over that of the ASIC.
While in South Africa, Roland Triffaux presented seminars to customers of Avnet Kopp and details of these and future visits can be obtained from Hannes Taute, Director, Semiconductor Division of Avnet Kopp.
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