EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2020 – Achronix

Continued explosion of amount of data created causing increased development of FPGA-based hardware platforms optimized for data acceleration.

The industry has witnessed an explosion of data over the past decade with the amount of data expected to hit 175 zettabytes by 2025. The challenge ahead becomes trying to derive meaningful insights from the massive amount of unstructured and structured data. This has forced the development of many new AI hardware and software based solutions to process data in the most cost, power and time efficient manner. Addressing this challenge is much different from in the past where each generation of more powerful CPUs could keep up.

To address this challenge, we are seeing the rise of heterogeneous computing systems customized for specific workload acceleration. However, having multiple different hardware platforms is limiting, and we see trends toward creating reprogrammable architectures optimized for the specific workload that needs acceleration. Achronix sees FPGAs becoming the clear accelerator of choice with Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu and Huawei all offering or using FPGAs as custom accelerators. This trend will accelerate in 2020 as fast followers will copy the industry leaders in their hardware platforms and still be able to differentiate with their own custom algorithms within the FPGA. Achronix believes our Speedster7t FPGAs are ideally suited for these data acceleration applications in 2020 and beyond.

• A significant rise in the use of eFPGA technology to address unique market requirements and increasing need for silicon differentiation

Embedded FPGA or eFPGAs offer the ability to integrate FPGA technology monolithically into a custom ASIC device. Instead of buying a standalone FPGA, customer can license the IP and integrate into a custom ASIC like any other IP. Embedded FPGA technology started to gain in popularity in the last decade with several companies who now provide this technology for the semiconductor industry.  The benefit of eFPGA is significant for those who are developing their own ASIC but want to retain some hardware flexibility alongside their custom hardened IP and I/O interfaces. In the past, the only option was to develop your ASIC and add a small companion FPGA. This consumed extra board space, limited performance due to needing an external I/O interface to connect the devices and added cost.  With an eFPGA, designers can customize their FPGA resources to their application requirements, design custom connection to other ASIC IP and provide a single chip solution that includes hardware flexibility.  This type of device is ideal for embedded applications like industrial IoT and automotive which are cost, board space and power constrained but need to incorporate hardware flexibility to support changing standards and evolving algorithms.

In 2020, Achronix predicts eFPGA technology adoption to grow exponentially and to be deployed across a wide variety of applications due to the need to embed flexibility to support changing workloads and evolving standards. Since the ASIC market will continue to grow and predicted to reach $28B by 2026, there is a significant opportunity for eFPGA technology for ASIC manufactures who need to retain flexibility in their ASIC designs.

As the only manufacturer of both eFPGA and standalone FPGA devices, Achronix expects significant growth in eFPGA technology designed into a wide variety of markets in the next decade.

Tags: Predictions

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2020 at 6:01 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.