Jan

15

Xilinx races towards 45nm in Singapore

Filed Under Emerging Technology, FPGA and ASIC, Foundry | 3 Comments

Good news to Singapore Semiconductor Industry. Xilinx is strengthening its R&D arm in Singapore to develop next-generation 45nm platform FPGA family. Xilinx has established its Asia-Pacific regional headquarter in Singapore since 2004 for several reasons: (1) proximity to Asia-Pacific customers (2) good infrastructure and talent pool in the island, and (3) of course not forgetting the UMC Singapore 12″ fab. In fact, the Xilinx Asia-Pacific headquarter at Changi is just 10 minutes drive from the UMC Singapore fab at Pasir Ris.

Both Xilinx and Altera, the two major FPGA market players claiming 80% of the market share, are seeing more interactions between design and process, starting from 90nm nodes. In 45nm, there are bound to have much more design and process interaction and complications. In addition, both companies are also introducing more favors to Virtex-5 and Stratix-3 product families respectively, with each variation optimised for particular application areas e.g. low power or high performance, rather than having a one-size-fits-all FPGA family at each node.

The press release of the Xilinx news says

Establishing an R&D team in our Asia-Pacific headquarters is another significant milestone for our global expansion plans and increases our focus on this strategically important region,” said Wim Roelandts, president, CEO and chairman of the board, Xilinx. “This is a long-term commitment from our company to develop a programmable chip R&D facility in Singapore to address the high-performance needs of our key customers across Asia Pacific.

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