ASICs going but not gone, panel says

ASICs going but not gone, panel says
By Crista Souza, EBN
October 24, 2003 (9:58 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20031024S0013

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Cost pressures, changing requirements, and short design windows seem to favor programmable chip solutions, but are ASICs becoming extinct? Not exactly, according to industry experts.

A panel of experts at the Network Processor Conference here said the industry is witnessing the evolution of ASICs. What new form they will remains to be seen.

“Darwin was right,” said Warren Miller, vice president of marketing for Avnet Design Services, a unit of distributor Avnet Inc. (Phoenix). “What you see out there won't be a dinosaur anymore, it will be something else.”

ASICs continue to dominate in network processing applications, not because they are the best solution, but because OEMs have already invested in the design work and are reluctant to switch to a new chip architecture, said Allan Armstrong, an analyst at RHK, (South San Francisco, Calif.).

Market forces are beginning to change that mindset, he said.A February 2003 survey by Avnet of 73 customers, primarily in wired and wireless communications segments, bore out what pundits and chip suppliers have been saying for some time — that the projected lifetime volume of designs peaks in the 1,000 to 10,000-unit range, ASIC design cycles are unpredictable, and market requirements constantly change.

“I believe the broad use of cell-based ASICs is over,” said Robert Blake, vice president of product planning at Altera Corp., based here. “New pressures are changing the rules and opening up opportunities, mainly for FPGAs in the low-density space, and structured ASICs in the high density space.”

The opportunity for “structured” approaches is determined by various sources between $2 billion and $5 billion. “That's stolen mainly from standard-cell ASICs, not FPGAs,” said Doug Bailey, vice president of marketing at Chip Express Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

Even so, structured ASICs have largely been identified with FPGA-to-ASIC conversions, leaving suppliers with a m arketing dilemma. Some are clearly on the defensive with regard to reprogrammability, the one FPGA feature ASICs can't compete with.

Reprogrammability ends up on the bench in most mission-critical applications, said Majid Bemanian, senior director of marketing for communications products at LSI Logic Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.).

“You can value reprogrammability in all kinds of ways, but it's a very expensive cost,” said Chip Express' Bailey. “FPGAs are great tools for prototyping and emulation, but you would have to be crazy to put one into production.”

Others maintained the need for flexibility favors programmable platforms.

“A $5 billion industry can't be driven by a bunch of 'crazy' customers,” asserted Krishna Rangasayee, director of vertical market strategy at Xilinx Inc. (San Jose).

“I've seen a lot of projects go wrong because engineers got it wrong, but I've seen a lot more go wrong because the requirements changed,” added RHK's Armstrong. “Programmability is something I think is fun damental to a lot of communication platforms' needs.”

Stefan Tamme, vice president of sales and marketing at Leopard Logic Inc., added that a hybrid architecture is needed that combines the best of FPGA and ASIC and drops the limitations of each. Tamme said the Cupertino, Calif., startup is preparing a January launch of a product that he claims fits the bill, but he declined to elaborate.

RHK's Armstrong agreed that ASICs have to change, but in the end may take on many shapes. “I believe a lot of next- generation boxes will contain something other than ASICs,” he said. “It could be ASIC-plus-FPGA or ASIC-plus-network processor or something else, but some sort of hybrid architecture will be required.”