Ratford said: "Our Virtex-5 products on 65nm have been shipping for 18 months, growing quickly and gaining market share vs. Stratix-3, which is also on 65nm. Since Altera has had difficulty executing on 65nm as far as Stratix III is concerned, they've had to jump to 45/40nm and the recently pre-announced Stratix IV.

"Altera is saying that it will ship the first samples by December. However it takes quite some time to ramp to volume on a node and to put in place all the software and IP required. Our 45/40nm design has been underway for some time and we'll be in the market with a complete solution at the same time as Altera.

"What matters is when you ramp to production and when you have critical mass of IP so customers can start designs. We have a much larger IP portolio. Customer design activity on high-end FPGAs will remain on 65nm devices for some time to come. We estimate that Xilinx has about a 97 percent market-share in the high-end with our Virtex-5 family."

Alternative to HardCopy ASICs
This is not all! According to Ratford, Xilinx also has an alternative to Altera's HardCopy ASICs!

Ratford added: "EasyPath provides similar cost reduction path for customers. Our approach doesn't require design compromises like that of HardCopy. Altera's most recent quarter showed HardCopy revenue down 2 percent to about $10M/quarter. It's insignificant."

The last part of this discussion with Xilinx will appear later this week or next. Remain tuned folks!