Altera FPGAs: Cyclone
It's amazing how far the field programmable business has moved in twenty years. Shows my age, but the very first microprocessor project I did was a hardware multiprocessor system using Sun Microsystems boards (before they got famous, Sun stood for Stanford University Network and they were building Motorola 68000 system boards) and also FPGAs to do the hardware signalling. I think they had may 1K devices on them. Now here is the state of the are:
* Cyclone: The Lowest-Cost FPGA Ever. Altera is the share leader right now with $8B market cap and billions in revenue. Their flagship is the Cyclone low cost FPGA. Has if you can believe it 20K logic elements as well as all kinds of wonderful things included a full embedded processor. Amazing.
* "Altera":http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ALTR&d=t. Wow, this company $800M in revenue and is actually growing smartly. In 31 Dec 02, they had $180M in sales and in the September 03 quarter, they had $209M. Profitable the whole time. Amazing for a capex company.
Comments
If you had an FPGA that was field programmable and did the work of an ASIC at a decent speed and cost, why would you pay for a foundry and lock the design into 6 month cycles ?
I used Altera PLDs to build clock recovery, correlators and digital modulators - luv 'em !
Posted by: adrian | November 19, 2003 09:53 PM