Re: FPGA growth vs. ASIC growth

As a purely technical or technological subject, this comparison is
meaningless, for every FPGA is actually designed as an ASIC. The
difference between FPGA and ASIC, and the reason why the former is
growing and the latter is lingering, is economics.
Not too many potential ASIC users can afford to invest $50 M or 200
man-years in the development of a state-of-the-art ASIC, but Xilinx and
Altera can, and do. They design a basic FPGA that can easily be
"step-and-repeated" to generate a whole FPGA family that over its life
(of not too many years) results in sales of several Billion dollars.
That business model works very well for Xilinx and Altera. Ask any
investor in LSI Logic how well the ASIC business is doing...
When Paul writes:
Another factor to take into account is that the FPGA vendor's
cutting-edge devices - the first ones on 90nm, for example - are
invariably large, expensive, and low yield, and so probably not useful
to most customers. So, it could even be argued that the ability to
take advantage of new processes isn't actually that useful anyway.

I suggest to look at the Spartan-3 family, our highest-running 90-nm
family. Few designers would call Spartan-3 "large, expensive, and low
yield,,,and not useful for most customers"
Every new process has a learning curve, but that works in favor of
FPGAs, since only they create the enormous volumes that drive yield up
and cost down.

In short, FPGA vs ASIC is not a question of technology, but largely of
economics and risk tolerance.
ASICs are for extreme applications: extreme quantity, extreme
complexity, extreme speed, and extremely low power. In most other
applications, FPGAs (or other standard parts) are an increasingly
popular alternative. I see the FPGA, microprocessor, and ASSP as the
obvious choices by default, ASIC is the exception that must be
justified in each individual case.
But then I admit to being biased...
Peter Alfke, Xilinx

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Relevant Pages

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