Mayday Mayhem
FPGA Announcements Galore

If March winds bring April showers, then April showers must somehow give rise to new announcements in programmable logic and structured ASIC. From tools to technology to applications, let's sail through some of the most interesting announcements this week to pick up on the latest trends. There continue to be significant advances in the design tools, silicon technology, and applications for FPGAs and customizable logic devices. A close look at this week's news serves to highlight the direction that the industry is currently taking.

As FPGAs continue their migration from glue logic devices to central components in complex systems, companies are responding with a wealth of new techniques and technologies to manage the challenges created by this new, starring role. This week, Altera introduced a new Quartus II with incremental compilation, Atmel rolled out a new line of FPGA-based platforms that facilitate function sharing, eASIC (along with STMicroelectronics) announced significant progress in proving its e-Beam personalized configurable fabric, Mentor Graphics made a major improvement in the design verification flow for users of its Catapult C, and Xilinx announced TS16949 certification of its XA family of FPGAs for automotive applications.

Altera's Incremental Improvement
Altera announced version 5.0 of its Quartus II tools this week with an emphasis on "incrementality." Every major software release has a wide range of improvements (and this Quartus II 5.0 is no exception), but incremental design is one that deserves special mention. As FPGAs have continued to grow larger and more complex, two trends have emerged that have presented special challenges for design tools. First, the "compile" time (the badly-named duration of a place-and-route run) has gone up significantly with recent generations of giant devices. What used to require a few minutes on your laptop can now take hours on a much faster machine. Second, the larger designs possible with larger devices often demand additional engineers. Many projects have gone beyond the one- or two-designer barrier and are having to deal with the implications of team-based design. [more]

The Programmable Base Station
by David Gamba, Senior Marketing Manager, Strategic Solutions Marketing, Xilinx

Today there are 1.6 billion wireless subscribers in the world with the number anticipated to grow to 2.6 billion in the next 5 years. These numbers show that wireless subscriptions have already surpassed the number of internet users (expected to top 1 billion by mid-2005) and will represent a 37% penetration rate of the entire world population by 2010! To support this growth, wireless infrastructure deployments will also have to experience tremendous growth during the next few years.

Even with this growth, the wireless infrastructure industry can still be classified as entering a mature life cycle phase as we are beginning to see major industry consolidation. For example, Sprint recently bought Nextel to form a combined entity with revenues exceeding $40 billion and Cingular acquired AT&T wireless forming a combined entity with revenues of over $30 billion. These consolidations have positioned the cellular service providers to exercise a greater amount of purchasing power over the wireless infrastructure providers to force them to greatly decrease infrastructure equipment prices. [more]

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