FPGAs Gain Ground In China
By The EEFocus Staff
FPGAs are booming in China. When Clement Cheung, director of marketing and applications at Xilinx Asia Pacific showed up to give a speech recently, he was worried not many people would come. He need not have worried.
The sales of all the major FPGA vendors show a significant bump in sales to the Asia/Pacific region. In Xilinx’s case, they exceed sales in North America, and there has been a huge increase in the number of FPGA engineers and engineers using FPGAs inside of China. This follows the shift of manufacturing to the Asia/Pacific region earlier this decade.
But Cheung said China is particularly important to FPGA vendors: “We pay more attention to the growth of Chinese enterprises because only they can truly influence the country.”
The proportion of FPGAs in communications and in the enterprise fell sharply following the 2001 downturn, but FPGA vendors managed to weather the latest downturn relatively intact by limiting their presence in communications to less than 50% and by hedging across multiple other markets.
“The main reason [for growth] is the 3G network deployment in countries like China,” said Clement Cheung. This was also one of the key reasons that the Asia/Pacific reason posted strong growth. Xilinx’s growth in China has been in the double digits, Cheung said.
FPGAs have been particularly popular because they lower the barrier of entry for design companies. It currently costs millions of dollars for an ASIC mask, but an FPGA is a much less expensive alternative. Huawei, which applied for the most patents inside of China in 2008, based a lot of its work on FPGAs.
“In China, FPGA engineers have a larger number and all of them stand on the same starting line,” Cheung said. “But FPGAs are more than a pure chip game. At present, most engineers need to consider signal integrity, layout, timing and other system-level issues.”
Xilinx CEO Moshe Gavrielov pointed out that the device functions had changed in the FPGA industry over the past 25 years, evolving from the simple circuit such as peripheral interface and glue logic to the main chip of whole system. “The concept of platform was not obvious because customers didn’t need too many application designs in the past. Today, the chip, software and whole design environment all need to be combined together for the project design.”
–EEFocus is the Chinese media partner of System-Level Design.
