But if all it took to hit it big were impressing me with a PowerPoint presentation, the list of successful companies would be quite a bit longer than it actually is. I may be a sucker for a strong pitch and nifty graphical animation, but ultimately I'm not going to buy any chips.
February 22, 2010
Altium claims 500 new U.S. customers in past year
By
Dylan
McGrath
Last year April, Australian design tool provider Altium Ltd. rolled the dice, slashing the price of its Altium Designer circuit board tool by about 75 percent in the hopes of spurring wider adoption. On Monday, Altium (Sydney) issued a statement saying it has picked up more than 500 new customers in the U.S. over the past 12 months.
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Gerry Gaffney
Altium |
But here's the catch: Altium executives say the price cut has had little, if any, impact on the new customer wins.
They cite a customer survey conducted last December, which found that only 14 percent of those customers who switched said they did so because of low cost. The majority of switchers cited "high value" (38 percent) and product capabilities (33 percent).
"It was interesting to see that the smallest pocket chose it because of cost," said Gerry Gaffney, CEO of Altium's North American operations, during a recent interview. "There was an expectation that price would have been a bigger factor than it turned out to be in the survey."
It's a little tough to swallow that the price reduction was not a significant factor here. Despite the reasons customers cite, you've got to believe that the price of the tool played a role in customers' decision. After all, the common definition of "value" is worth relative to cost. So price is at least part of the equation.
The survey, which was compiled from 208 responses, also found that 84 percent of Altium's new users had experienced productivity improvements of more than 200 percent. Eighty-five percent of respondents also said the degree of difficulty in migrating to Altium Designer was as expected or easier than expected. And 89 percent of the new users said they would recommend Altium to colleagues, according to the company.
The survey also found that users who are switching to Altium are pretty evenly dispersed across a wide range of application markets, including medical devices, industrial, telecommunication and automotive.
"It's interesting that the adoption is not coming from a single vertical market," said Bob Potock, director of technical marketing for Altium. "That was quite telling in the survey."
Despite the rosy numbers, Gaffney said Altium has no intention of jacking the price of Altium Designer back up to the old level. Thought the company may make "tactical tweaks" to pricing, the "price range that we are in is probably where we'll stay," Gaffney said.
Note: There are some caveats to the 500 companies figure. Altium counts different divisions of the same company as separate users, for example.
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February 17, 2010
A dissenting opinion on the 'programmable imperative'
By
Dylan
McGrath
Xilinx Inc. President and CEO Moshe Gavrielov uses the term "programmable imperative" to describe what he sees as the alignment of market and technology forces creating a tipping point whereby FPGAs are displacing ASICs for many applications.
It's essentially an old argument with a fancy new name. Programmable logic suppliers have been arguing since the invention of FPGAs that the flexibility of the devices and lower associated non-recurring engineering costs make them a superior choice to ASICs in many applications. The counterargument goes that ASICs offer performance, size and manufacturing cost savings that can't be touched by FPGAs.
As Sony Corp.'s Tsugio Makimoto postulated way back in 1991, these market and technology forces tend to swing back and forth; Makimoto's Wave describes 10-year cycles during which electronic products migrate from standard parts to custom devices, then shift back in the other direction. Still, recent trends such as the declining number of ASIC starts seem to support Gavrielov's contention that a true tipping point in favor of programmability is finally upon us.
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Jack Harding
eSilicon Corp. |
But Jack Harding, chairman, president and CEO of ASIC design and services provider eSilicon Corp. has a simple question for those declaring victory for FPGAs: Where is the money?
"If FPGAs are becoming pervasive, why has the FPGA market not grown in eight years?" Harding asked during a recent interview at eSilicon's Sunnyvale, Calif. headquarters.
Harding says the size of the programmable logic market has remained essentially stuck at around $4 billion since the early part of this decade. While FPGA vendors are certainly shipping many more transistors than they did in 2001, they haven't been able to translate that into revenue gains. Harding says the market has essentially assigned a value of about $4 billion per year to FPGAs in exchange for their flexibility and ease of use.
Meanwhile, Harding says, the ASIC market continues to grow and is worth between $22 billion and $24 billion per year.
"If I was in a market that hadn't grown in 10 years, I wouldn't argue that I was cannibalizing a much bigger market," Harding said.
Bryan Lewis, vice president and chief analyst for semiconductors at Gartner Inc. puts a different spin on programmable logic revenue growth in recent years. According to Lewis, the PLD/FPGA market was worth about $4 billion in 2000 and looks to be worth about $4 billion in 2010. But the market has actually been growing fairly steadily since 2002, when revenue dipped below $2.5 billion, Lewis noted. The PLD/FPGA market has had to re-trench and broaden its application exposure after the communication and dotcom bust of 2000, he said.
"The new breed of FPGAs are in a strong position to add incremental growth going forward as they push leading edge manufacturing with new innovative architectures," Lewis added.
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| Total FPGA/PLD revenue by year. |
Harding certainly doesn't discount the value of FPGAs. (His company has been involved in building several, including the latest FPGA from startup Achronix).
FPGAs are critical for prototyping and powering lower volume applications, Harding says. And despite all of the hype over an ongoing ASIC versus FPGA tug of war, Harding says that in 80 percent of cases the choice between which type of device to use in a given application is a no-brainer. It's the other 20 percent of cases where FPGAs and ASICs butt heads, he says.
Harding, a former CEO of EDA vendor Cadence Design Systems who founded eSilicon 10 years ago, cites the comparatively hefty marketing communications budgets of FPGA vendors for creating the impression that FPGAs and ASICs are going toe-to-toe across a much larger swatch of applications than they actually are. "That's the only difference between where FPGAs are and where they are perceived to be," Harding said.
For the record, Harding doesn't dispute widely disseminated data on the declining number of ASIC design starts. But he makes the case that more ASICs are being integrated into systems-on-a-chip. What may have been four separate ASIC designs years ago may now be one very large ASIC. While the total number of ASIC design starts is on the decline, the number of transistors and value of current ASIC designs remain on the rise, according to Harding.
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