 |
| |
| FPGA startup crunch: SiliconBlue looks to break new ground |
Dylan McGrath
Monday 04 May 2009 |
| |
|
This article is part of a series that examines the status of various FPGA startups in light of the economic recession. |
| |
| SAN FRANCISCO—SiliconBlue Technologies Corp., a four-year old startup backed by $40 million in venture capital funding, is aiming to buck the odds and thrive with low-cost field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in a product market that has traditionally shunned them: battery-based handheld consumer products. |
| |
|
With products that promise low cost and low power consumption, at least one analyst—Gartner Inc.'s Bryan Lewis—thinks SiliconBlue is the most intriguing of the current crop of promising FPGA startups. |
| |
| Low-end FPGAs have traditionally been unable to hit the cost and power budget requirements to play in the market for handheld consumer products. But SiliconBlue claims—among other things—to offer the first single-chip SRAM FPGA, the world's lowest-power FPGAs, small form factors and a product that costs $1 per part in high volumes. |
| |
| SiliconBlue's FPGAs, like other low-cost PLDs from established vendors, are aiming to displace ASICs and application-specific standard products in handheld devices. According to Kapil Shankar, SiliconBlue's founder and CEO, SiliconBlue will grow the total available market for FPGAs by expanding applications in high-volume, battery-powered markets. |
| |
| Shankar said SiliconBlue's devices are the closest thing there is to an ASIC in the FPGA world. Compared with traditional FPGAs, flash-based FPGAs and complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), SiliconBlue's ICE FPGAs most closely approximate the combination of cost, power and single-chip advantages offered by ASICs, he claimed. |
| |
| "Architecturally we are an FPGA, but we should be called an ASIC," Shankar said. He added, "I understand that FPGAs have been claiming that they are like ASICs for a long time." |
| |
| According to Shankar, SiliconBlue has more than 40 design wins so far. He said he expects consumer products incorporating SiliconBlue devices to start hitting store shelves by the end of the year. SiliconBlue so far has three devices in production, he said, and earlier this year began shipping early production quantities. By the end of the year the company expects to have shipped more than 1 million devices, Shankar said. |
| |
| "We are the first new FPGA company in more than 10 years with devices in production," Shankar said. |
| |
| SiliconBlue has raised $40 million in two rounds of venture funding. According to Shanker, the company still has almost half of the money in the bank. |
| |
| SiliconBlue (Santa Clara, Calif.) is one of a number of promising FPGA startups to appear in recent years, at least some of which are rumored to be struggling. Some fear that at least some of these FPGA startups will fold, as did Ambric Inc. and Mathstar Inc. last year, or be acquired. |
| |
| According to Gartner's Lewis, SiliconBlue is the most intriguing company among the current crop of FPGA startups based on the market it is focused on. Most of the other FPGA startups are aiming at higher-cost FPGAs. |
| |
| "The thing I like about SiliconBlue is that they are dedicated to low power and low cost," Lewis said. "Those are the axes to play on as a startup. The reason I think they are hot is that they are focused on the right markets at the right time." |
| |
| Shankar has previously described SiliconBlue's hybrid flash-SRAM technology as the first new FPGA technology in 10 years. The company's first three products are fabed with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC)'s low-power 65-nm process technology. The entry-level iCE65L02 has 1,792 logic cells and up to 128 I/O pins. At 32 kHz, power consumption is as low as 25 microamps. The high-end iCE65L16, with 16,896 logic cells and up to 384 I/O pins, consumes 250 A at 32 kHz, according to the company. |
| |
| SiliconBlue's devices incorporate FPGA-like lookup tables and a "nonvolatile configuration memory" technology on the same chip. |
| |
| The company's iCEcube design tool suite boasts an ASIC-like interface and works on Windows or Linux. The tool suite integrates front-end synthesis and placement technology from Magma Design Automation Inc. with the company's own proprietary back-end physical design tools, according to the company. SiliconBlue also claims a portfolio of more than 50 IP elements. |
| |
| SiliconBlue is doing the right things, Lewis said, noting the company's use of TSMC's low-power design process . But Lewis acknowledged that it is very difficult to assess the company's chances for success without more information about its finances or its design win activity. |
| |
| Lewis said most the FPGA startups are seeing a fair amount of design activity and that they all have a compelling story on paper. "But the bottom line is: show me the money," Lewis said. |
| |
| But with its focus on the consumer handheld product space, SiliconBlue could generate very healthy revenue with only two or three good design wins, Lewis added. |
| |
| Lewis said the crop of FPGA startups has two possible paths to success, both of which require generating substantial revenue. The first option is to go public, "which isn't happening right now," Lewis said. From October 2008 through last month there was not a single venture backed initial public offering in the U.S., the first time that has happened for two consecutive quarters. |
| |
| The second path, Lewis said, is for the startups to be acquired by the established programmable logic vendors. He said it would be ironic if FPGA market leader Xilinx Inc. acquired SiliconBlue, since the founding team, including Shankar, came from Xilinx. |
| |
| Despite the difficult economy, Shankar said SiliconBlue is exceeding expectations and has not cut staff. The company never planned to generate significant revenue in 2009, he said, envisioning it as a "design in" year. But since January, SiliconBlue has seen an inordinate amount of design activity, according to Shakar, which he admits he doesn't fully understand in light of the recession. SiliconBlue is running ahead of its design win goal for 2009, Shankar said, and is "cautiously excited" about its short-term prospects. |
| |
| Shankar discussed some of the company's design wins in vague terms, but declined to identify any customers. In cellular handsets, he said, SiliconBlue's devices are being used to implement things like dual-front cameras and other "things that don't exist today in the cellphone but are getting designed by our customers." |
| |
| SiliconBlue is also scoring design wins in the emerging netbook sector, where the device is being used to provide functionality that the leading netbook processors, Intel Corp.'s Atom and Qualcomm Inc.'s Snapdragon, do not, Shanker said. Netbook OEMs are using SiliconBlue's chip in tandem with Atom to provide the mobility functions that Atom lacks, he said, and in tandem with Snapdragon to do things like drive displays, he said. |
| |
| Next-generation devices at 40- and 28-nm nodes are in the design and development stages, Shankar said. SiliconBlue expects to have 40-nm devices available in 2010 or 2011 and 28-nm devices available in 2012 or 2013, he said. |
| |
| SiliconBlue has about 50 full-time employees, plus about 30 more contractors and consultants on the payroll, according to Shankar. |
