As FPGAs have long been a technology used in a number of our system on modules, I read Steve Leibson’s recent post on EETimes – The State of the FPGA Union Is Uncertain – with great interest.
The uncertainty, as he sees it, is largely “thanks to tectonic upheavals with some key players.” But despite “tectonic upheavals,” he sees a positive outlook across the FPGA spectrum from the low end to the high end.
Where and why does Leibson see the uncertainty?
Well, last winter, Intel – which had acquired FPGA-maker Altera back in 2015 – decided to spin out its FPGA group into a new, somewhat independent, company. The new name has a back to the future feel. It’s doing business as Altera, An Intel Company. It may not be “An Intel Company” for long, as there’s an IPO on the horizon (2026).
Having Altera be Altera is a positive for the FPGA world, as it never really fit into the Intel processor world. Intel’s processors and tools, Steve writes, were built for making processors.
FPGAs are not processors. Instead, they are chock full of routing networks that connect sparse clumps of on-die logic and memory.
Construction-wise, FPGAs are nearly the complete opposite of processors, which rely on densely packed logic and minimally short routing networks to achieve their high performance. A semiconductor manufacturing process that is overly optimized for making processors—Intel’s bread-and-butter products—is necessarily suboptimal for making FPGAs.
Meanwhile, the other “top two” dominant player in the FPGA market, AMD, got into the FPGA world with its 2022 acquisition of Xilinx. But the biggest proponent of FPGAs at AMD, CEO Victor Peng has retired. Peng came along with the Xilinx acquisition, as he had been the CEO there for many years. Does this put FPGA-making at AMD “in a sort of limbo?” It remains to be seen whether AMD follows Intel’s lead and spins out of the FPGA business.
Altera is making some moves:
…modernizing its product line and is wisely migrating all three FPGA tiers—high-end, mid-range, and (ahem) cost-optimized—to a unified Agilex brand. That means the high-end Stratix, mid-range Arria, and low-end Cyclone and MAX FPGAs are at the end of their life cycles, from a development perspective. [Though these families will continue to be available for many years to come.]
Leibson doesn’t see all that much happening at the high end at either AMD or Altera, but does note that AMD/Xilinx tends to be ahead of Intel/Altera in coming out with new high-end products.
One likely explanation for this lag [between production announcements from AMD and Intel] is that processors get priority access to new process nodes at Intel, while AMD’s foundry of record for nearly the last 15 years, TSMC, provides customers with access to its latest process nodes as long as they will pay TSMC’s price.
There’s more happening at the lower end of the FPGA market, as both Altera and AMD have announced low-end FPGA production for 2025. But both AMD/Xilinx and Altera/Intel have a history of not prioritizing mid- and lower-end FPGA’s. This has enabled a couple of other FPGA vendors – Lattice Semiconductor and Microchip – to compete against the big guys.
Leibson’s bottom line is that the outlook for FPGAs is positive:
The entire FPGA industry benefits from the increased competition. There is a lot of life left in newer-but-not-leading-edge semiconductor processes that can be used for these more cost-sensitive FPGA market segments as the older manufacturing lines are depreciated. At the same time, the race to develop the next leading-edge process nodes provides ample opportunity for the high-end FPGA segment to grow, as well.
When it comes to FPGAs, what we’re seeing is very encouraging. We work in close partnership with Altera and have a few SOM families the use Xilinx as well. We are excited to see both manufacturers taking steps to grow board-level interest in their products, especially with Altera’s latest Agilex 5 FPGA, which we have developed a number of solutions around including a single board computer (MitySBC-A5E) and a family of system on modules (MitySOM-A5E). Customer adoption of SOMs continues to be on the rise, and the latest FPGAs deliver more performance with greater efficiency for customers developing advanced applications.