Is the ASIA Pacific Region the Wild West for FPGAs?
Posted by Dave Orecchio on Thu, Mar 22, 2007 @ 05:21 PM
It is said that Buffalo Bill Cody is the person who gave the Wild West its name. The early days of America were wild ones. The movies about that time created feelings of excitement and tremendous opportunity, although with significant risk to life and limb.
So you ask - What does this have to do with FPGAs?
Jerry Worchel, Senior Analyst at In-Stat has a research report on the FPGA market and he has a forecast of the revenue by region. From this report, it looks like the FPGA revenue in the Asia Pacific region will have a 13.5% CAGR from 2006 through 2010, Almost three times the growth rate of each of the other regions.
Additionally, the report had some interesting findings:
The largest two end-use segments will be communications and industrial, whose combined market share of the FPGA market will increase from 73.8% in 2005, to 76.8% by 2010.
FPGAs find applications across the entire spectrum of electronic system design, from basic glue logic at the lower densities, to high-complexity, ASIC-type devices at the high-density end.
At the high-end, products such as Altera's Stratix family, or Xilinx's Virtex family, find their main applications in the development of high-volume products, most notably in the communications market.
What is the cause of the growth in this region? We generally associate the chips sales in the Pacific Rim to the off-shoring of manufacturing, however there is a significant amount of design work in this area as identified by the design tool sales of the major EDA companies. According to EDAC the AP region accounts for roughly 13% of the total EDA sales, small in comparison to other geographical regions.
Perhaps the region needs an electronics industry equivalent of Buffalo Bill to change this perception from that of manufacturers to innovators. If this happens, I bet that FPGA devices will be the vehicle of choice for the implementation of all of the new creative products.