Report Reserve Announces Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Market to 2020 Report

June 29, 2011 - PRLog -- "Report Reserve announces addition of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Market to 2020 - Increasing Preference for FPGAs over Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) will Drive Demand, that provides an insight into the Global FPGA market.

The study, which is an offering from the company’s Technology Research Group, provides an in-depth analysis of the FPGA market across the world and highlights the various concerns, shifting trends and major players in the region. It provides forecasts for the FPGA sales revenue, major FPGA facilities and the emerging markets till 2020. The research also provides the business viability in different geographic regions. The report provides analysis of the key trends and challenges in the FPGA market across the world. An analysis of the competitive scenario in different countries is also provided. The report is built using the data and information sourced from proprietary databases, primary and secondary research and in-house analysis by GBI Research’s team of industry experts.

Reduced Time to Market Will Prove to be the Key Growth Driver for the FPGA Market

Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) across the globe are increasingly opting for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) instead of Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) in order to reduce the time to market. FPGAs offer flexibility and facilitate rapid prototyping. FPGAs also offer an advantage of testing and verifying a concept in hardware without passing through the long fabrication process. Engineers can then make changes and can run number of iterations on an FPGA circuit within hours, rather than in weeks.

As design requirements often change over a period of time, the cost of implementing these incremental changes to FPGAs are almost negligible as compared to the large expense associated with other ICs, such as ASICs. The impact of this driver is expected to be high in the short term period, until 2014. The graph below explains how missing the market window will wipe out all the profits from development and production:
As illustrated above, the profit potential will be comparatively high with an early product launch. Prolonging the time to market will result in reduced profitability.

Power Optimization – a Major Concern

FPGA manufacturers are facing a key challenge in establishing equilibrium between power consumption and design performance. The job is becoming more challenging as designs grow larger and more complex and process geometries shrink to 28nm and below. FPGAs available in the market provide performance and functionalities that chip manufacturers require, but power consumption is higher.

Designing for low power in programmable gate arrays is crucial to the overall design equation for different end markets including communication and consumer electronics market. The telecommunications industry is a more mature FPGA market in this regard, with programmable gate arrays used heavily in routers, switches, base stations and storage servers. These new generation products demand larger and higher performance FPGAs.

FPGA designers are continuing to increase the performance window by adding more functionality into FPGAs and replacing ASICs and ASSPs, while demanding higher system performance. Although the newest 28nm generation FPGAs consumes less power than previous 90nm products, FPGAs still consume a large share of total system power. Designers nowadays design into tighter and smaller spaces, making it hard to provide better airflow and set up proper size heat sinks. Therefore, thermal management and consequently power management both contribute to an area of concern for high-end FPGA design.

Flat Panel TVs Expected to Boost FPGA Sales

Flat panel TVs are expected to open up numerous opportunities for FPGAs, such as the Xilinx Spartan FPGA family and the Altera Cyclone FPGA family. Today, flat panel display and TV producers have to be innovative - not only will they have to find out what advanced functionality sets to add in their next generation TVs to differentiate their TVs from the growing number of competitors, they will also have to get the TVs to market quickly. TV Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have found that if they want to stay on top and maintain their edge in the TV market, they will have to use low cost FPGAs instead of ASSPs

Usage of FPGAs in flat panel TVs will enhance overall system performance. By shifting to Spartan and Cyclone FPGAs, TV manufacturers can easily optimize and improve the full hardware functionality. The main advantage is that OEMs can integrate the functionalities of multiple circuits into a single FPGA chip; hence, eliminating all the limitations of ASSP based circuits that only allow a few modifications. Switching to a single chip FPGA based design from a multi-chip ASSP based design will result in low power consumption, more space, and overall device performance enhancement. There will also be a reduction of the overall material cost, and most importantly end-product differentiation.

China to Drive Growth in the FPGA Market

China contributed to 43% of the overall Asia Pacific FPGA sales revenue in 2009 and its revenues are expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.9% during the period 2009-2020 in dollar terms. Primary research points to a steep increase in the number of FPGA designers and designers using FPGAs in China.

The consumption of FPGAs in Asia Pacific is expected to show a marked growth between 2010 and 2020.  Huge population and rising per capita income, coupled with favorable government policies has made the Asia Pacific countries including China and Japan, the world’s largest consumers and suppliers of electronic goods. All the major FPGA manufacturers registered robust growth in sales from the Asia Pacific region.

To get more insights to the topic, please visit http://www.reportreserve.com/reportdet.php?reportid=36019"

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ReportReserve is an online research report distribution company. The company lists several market research reports published by several research houses across the globe.