Thinking Like Xilinx
DSP, WiMax Announcements Highlight Strategy

Conventional wisdom says that Charles Dickens’s novels are so long because he was paid by the word. This is not strictly true, as his novels were published in serial form, and Dickens was paid by the installment. The net result is the same, however, as the volume of reading required to mine the gold from his classic works is legendary. Plot lines that could reasonably be summarized in a few succinct paragraphs drag on through chapter after chapter of flowery, flowing, profitable prose.

It appears sometimes that the PR professionals in FPGA and structured ASIC companies graduated from the Dickens school of composition for compensation. Over the past year, in fact, there have been more than one thousand press releases posted by the companies tracked by FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal. Lucky for you, we are constantly on the job, reading all those releases, analyzing the trends, and providing you with something akin to CliffsNotes, abstracting the mayhem into the more manageable. You do have products to design, after all.

Some of our time is spent sifting through the dregs of dreary diatribes on dead-end partnerships - “SuperFPGA Announces Strategic Partnership with Chapter 11 Software, Inc.,” superfluous superlatives - “LUTPower Introduces World’s Heaviest FPGA,” and maniacal legal maneuvers - “Patentbusters, LLC Files Counter-counter-claim Against Plagiarism Technologies Anti-infringement Suit.” Even more effort, however, goes into analyzing real industry and technology trends based on the painstakingly isolated, interesting minority of those releases. In those cases, wearing special spin-sensitive goggles (we are professionals, aren’t we?), and employing proprietary supercomputing algorithms, we can sometimes discern changes in the market not visible to the naked eye.

Witness the recent announcements by Xilinx on their DSP product roadmap and their WiMax solutions. Both are compelling announcements of real interest to designers in their respective domains. Beyond the announcements themselves, however, Xilinx is pointing in a direction that will impact all semiconductor companies competing in the rapidly emerging markets left vacant by the exodus of easy ASIC from the mainstream system designer’s toolbox.
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