Posted: 5/29/00 Program for E-applicances
John East
President and Chief Executive Officer
Actel Corp.
Sunnyvale, Calif.
A rapidly expanding consumer communications market being fed by the Internet. A cry for more and more bandwidth feeding the deployment of wireless and optical networks. And a burgeoning number of new e-appliance products to serve all of it.
What could be more opportune for the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) industry? Not only are those factors at play, but there are others:
- High-growth, rapidly evolving standards and a planned six-month-long product obsolescence.
- Breakneck time-to-market pressures for end-product manufacturers and diminishing support from gate-array ASIC suppliers, their traditional component sources.
- Quickly filling silicon foundries.
- Reductions in silicon process geometries that are helping enable FPGAs to approach price parity with ASICs.
We are seeing only the tip of the iceberg.
As an industry, FPGA and other programmable logic device providers continue to have considerable success supplying small to moderate volumes of devices to telecom infrastructures and datacom networks. But the e-appliance market demands the rapid delivery of very inexpensive, preprogrammed chips in very large quantities, not the prototype or pre-production volumes with which we are conditioned to contend.
But change is in the wind. Who would have thought five years ago-when a large order for us was 5,000 pieces-that we would be seeing orders today from a single customer for a single design of a million units? Perhaps only a few of us could have ever imagined two years back that Actel would have already shipped well over one million units just to applications in the MP3 player market. Heck, three years ago, who'd even heard of MP3?
It is human nature to resist change, but there are times when change is healthy and good. At Actel, we have recently made a change in our product development effort by adopting a market-solutions strategy. It has helped us identify the vertical markets we will serve, including e-appliances, and has caused us to become more proactive in those markets.
The opportunity for FPGA houses to both significantly contribute to the growth of the Internet appliance infrastructure and to benefit from it is very real. Similarly, the opportunity to succeed as an industry requires us to better understand the market needs of our new consumer-oriented customers and to adjust our thinking to correspond to their volume requirements and just-in-time demand.
AI
