In the last post I reviewed the risks to Altera and Xilinx due to competition from other platforms. In this post I’ll review the risks from existing competitors and new entrants.
PLD Market: Existing Competitors Gain Momentum
Actel with 6% market share has a strong niche in anti-fuse FPGAs (one time programmable) and in flash based FPGAs. Flash based FPGAs is a segment Xilinx and Altera have stayed away from, but February 2007 Xilinx’s introduced a flash-based Spartan-3AN and was named to EDN’s Hot 100 Products of 2007.
There have been many new entrants with Flash based FPGAs in recent years as venture capitalists and entrepreneurs may feel more compelled to compete in a corner of the market not dominated by one of the two industry leaders. Flash-based FPGAs have entering several new markets end markets and they may actually grow faster than the more traditional SRAM-based FPGAs.
Actel began shipping a Flash based FPGA in 1999 and they appear to currently have a strong leadership position in this good niche area of the FPGA market. Actel has a deal with ARM for putting soft versions of ARM7 processors in Actel’s non-volatile flash-based FPGAs. Altera recently began offering FPGAs that also support ARM processors.
Flash benefits from being non-volatile (e.g. it doesn’t need power to maintain the chip’s data), but SRAM devices will always be faster. Unlike SRAM based FPGAs, Flash based FPGAs do not have to be booted by an external device to load the software so they are more of a true single chip solution comparable to ASICs (related to power requirements and the number of components in circuit board design).
Lattice Semiconductor with 7% market share has made acquisition to attempt to increase its share in the PLD market. Having these diverse PLD software development platforms for its various acquisitions has been a disadvantage. In 2001, Lattice’s division Vantis and Agere (at the time Lucent) gave it a 25% market share in the PLD market. Lattice is strongest in the slower growing CPLD segment where it is number three in market share after being over taken by Xilinx in 2007 for the number two position. Altera is number one in CPLD market share.
QuickLogic with 1% market share targets specific applications (similar to ASSP’s) and is strong in power sensitive markets.
PLD Market: New Entrants
Newer companies such as ChaoLogix, Stretch, and Cswitch are entering the programmable logic space and trying to create a disruptive, game changing technology.
A big problem for start-ups and other semiconductor companies entering the programmable logic market is place and route tooling software, where Xilinx and Altera’s design platforms are dominant. Roelandts the CEO of Xilinx has stated that “there is no 3rd party place and route software; place and route software at Xilinx runs to 20 million lines of code.” A new company also runs into the problem that initially no one knows its development platform and the lack of IP available for the startups chips.
A larger better funded player like Intel, IBM, or Texas Instruments enters the market. With the Geneseo project Intel and IBM opened sourced what could have been a competitive advantage for them (discussed in a couple pages). A risk could be a strong player like Texas Instruments, with its current powerful position in analog and DSP, purchasing Actel to get a foothold in the PLD market.
