Critical Commoditization
SoftJin Simplifies Synthesis

The fortress of an established FPGA company has many walls. One side is defended by the incredible cost of creating a competitive programmable logic architecture in a cutting-edge process geometry. With the leverage of a process node or two between you and your competitors, you can successfully fend off an attack by a less-established company simply by being in production with a line of parts on the current smallest geometry available. However, the basic architectures of programmable logic are now fairly well known and not well defended by current patents, so anybody with good business sense, a little creativity, and enough venture cash to crunch out a few mask sets can be shipping silicon in short order.

Established FPGA companies also defend their turf with well-trained sales and support teams. Building a sales organization is a complicated, slow, and expensive business, but established distributors are willing to pick up a novel line if it shows promise of filling a market niche. If you’re starting your own FPGA company, you can usually get some leverage by taking advantage of existing distribution to market to sell your chips.

One of the hardest moats to cross for an aspiring FPGA competitor is the challenge of fielding a robust set of tools that will enable your customers to do something useful with your devices. While you can buy your way into other areas of the chip-making business, technology-specific design tools like synthesis and place-and-route are another story. Both of these tool technologies are highly dependent on the vagaries of your particular creative architecture, and both take significant time and money to develop to a mature state.

The established FPGA companies are generally pretty quiet about how much they spend on design tool development, but it is rumored to be roughly equal to what they spend on chip design. Certainly both Xilinx and Altera have very large software engineering organizations dedicated to the development and refinement of architecture-specific design software. Competitive tools are essential to the success of their product lines. Ready availability of these tools at a low cost to their customers also forms a significant competitive barrier against smaller competitors.

Other FPGA vendors rely heavily on partnerships with established EDA companies like Synplicity and Mentor Graphics in order to field a set of capable design tools. Unfortunately for a new FPGA startup, it can be hard to make a business case as to why one of these EDA companies should invest significant resources in supporting your novel architecture unless you can lead them to large numbers of customers they wouldn’t otherwise capture. This is almost never the case for a small, new company rolling out a new technology. [more]