Yoan Dupret
Last year, we talked about the fracturing of the old computing order and how no one can predict anymore the winning architectural or algorithmic solution for a given compute or communication problem – even within a two year event horizon. We used AI as a case in point – which turned out to be pretty accurate as we saw the emergence of companies with brand new architectures, and all very different, such as AnotherBrain, Blaize, Hailo or SiMA.ai, while some others already disappeared or pivoted their products.
We also talked about how sensors are becoming ubiquitous in our lives, the trend to customize merchant chips and the tendency toward highly heterogenous SoC architectures.
We concluded that this not only means more chips but also more changes in algorithms, architectures and interconnects which would lead to the increasing utilization of field reconfigurable device, such as the ones enabled by Menta embedded FPGA IP – in short ‘adaptive compute’ devices. This also turned out to be accurate.
What we did not predict though was the global sanity crisis of Covid-19. Despite this, several eFPGA IP providers announced design wins in 2020 and at Menta we did particularly well as we doubled our revenues – though we would have done much better without the virus.
