Altera targets $20 b ASIC market in India

BANGALORE: Setting its sights on the $20 billion ASIC industry, Altera Corporation today unveiled its new HardCopy Stratix device family, offering both ASIC and FPGA designers the ultimate in design flexibility. With this announcement, Altera hopes to seize the opportunity from the “ailing” ASIC industry whose value proposition, it claims, is suffering from intense economic pressure.

This newest version of HardCopy devices extends beyond simple FPGA migration. System designers of high-volume applications can now directly target a low-cost HardCopy Stratix device at the very beginning of their design cycle.

'More and more designers are looking to programmable logic to displace costly ASIC technologies, and Hard Copy devices gives them the additional, low-risk, low-cost option they need to fill their high-volume needs.' said Rich Wawrzyniak, Semico Research’s senior analyst for ASICs and SoCs.

Altera’s Quartus II version 3.0 design software supports the HardCopy Stratix devices and now gives designers two paths to choose from–one for FPGAs, and the other for high-volume HardCopy designs. Erik Cleage, Altera Corporation’s senior vice president of marketing, explains, “Customers can design for a few thousand FPGAs or 100,000 HardCopy devices without the cost and risks involved in ASIC development, all within a common design environment,” he said. 'Eventually, we’ll see a world where most system designers will choose between an FPGA or HardCopy device, depending on their volume. ASICs will be reserved for extremely high-volume applications that can justify the development costs–and those opportunities are dwindling.'

The first generation of HardCopy devices, specifically the APEX 20K version, has been designed into aerospace, networking, enterprise storage, and high-end consumer applications.