IC vendors lock horns over design approaches

IC vendors lock horns over design approaches
MONTEREY, Calif. — ASIC and programmable logic vendors sparred here in their continuing war over the propriety of each design approach at a panel session here in which they did agree on one thing: Sending designs offshore isn't a cure all.

"China is a concentration of trends we're seeing in electronics," said Chris Rowen, CEO of programmable-processor vendor Tensilica. "It's a community that's incredibly cost conscious and time conscious. That combination highlights magnifies everything we have to accomplish."

Jack Harding, chairman CEO of eSilicon, argued that the distance of a design operation from the Silicon Valley can degrade the project.

"I've contemplated moving layout capabilities offshore. The farther you get away from the greater Silicon Valley area, the less complexity you can manage," he said. Design teams need close proximity to tools vendors and in some cases the tools vendors' R&D teams, he added.

The panel at the Globalpress 2004 Summit here, chaired by Gartner Dataquest vice president and analyst Bryan Lewis, delved into the traditional cost tradeoffs between FPGAs and ASICs — the first generally held best for prototyping and modest volumes, the second considered the choice for high-volume applications. He said there are about 80,000 programmable logic designs today versus 4,000 ASIC designs.

But this time, the FPGA camp took it on the chin for something new: power hunger.

"Field programmability has its place, but the power issues are huge," said David Fritz, vice president of technical marketing at ARC International. "Leakage problem is going to exacerbate that."

"If you build something that works on a battery, FPGAs have never been great for that," said Eric Goetting, vice president and general manager of the Advanced Products Group at programmable logic vendor Xilinx. But "it's difficult for ASIC guys too because you have a bunch of transistors you can't turn off."

"Power is the Achilles [heel] of that particular technology," Harding chimed in. "But it's also much ado about nothing because FPGAs are less than 2 percent."

Robert Blake, vice president of product planning at Altera Corp., said power is such a big issue at 90 nm that it forced Altera to rethink its Stratix architecture when it created the Stratix II family. The design allows for a flexible use of inputs with an approach called the Adaptive Logic Module.

Chris King, CEO of AMI Semiconductor, and Goetting landed a couple of blows on each other, with King arguing the economic benefits at ASICs for volume applications. "If it's $100, it's a $40 ASIC," she said. "If I'm a designer, I'd love to be designing an FPGA, but I want an economical way to convert that FPGA into a hardwired design."

"The real conversion has been ASIC design teams changing into FPGA design teams," Goetting said. "That's the real conversion that's going on."