Tokyo-based chipmaker Renesas announced it has entered the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) market with a low-cost, low-power alternative to the offerings by Intel and Xilinx.
The new ForgeFPGA line will address an underserved market that needs lesser amounts of programmable logic for low-cost applications, Renesas said. Such applications could be to support sensors used in robots and autonomous vehicles as well as a wide array of industrial machines and even high-volume consumer and IoT applications.
The volume pricing of the units will be well under 50 cents with a standby power requirement of 20 microamps, almost half the power of competing devices, Renesas said. Initial devices in the ForgeFPGA family will serve applications requiring less than 5,000 logic gates and, initially, device sizes of 1K and 2K Look Up Tables.
The development software will be available for free when the first ForgeFPGA device, a 1K LUT product, ships in the second quarter of 2022.
Renesas provides an array of microcontrollers, analog, power and SoC products and holds about 9% of the global market for chips for the automotive industry, according to Statista. That puts it in third place behind Infineon and NXP and nearly tied with Texas Instruments in the automotive chip sector.
Intel and Xilinx currently dominate the FPGA market, and both serve data center and enterprise customers where Renesas is not expected to compete directly, according to analysts.. There are at least a dozen FPGA suppliers with a total market value of $5.7 billion in 2020, which is projected to reach $9 billion by 2026, according to Research and Markets.
Renesas serves the lower end industrial and controller space “but there will likely be some overlap in their markets especially in the automotive and networking sectors,” said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates.
“The FGPA market right now is red hot and anything in the artificial intelligence and machine language or high-speed networking area needs to use an FPGA,” Gold added. “I assume Renesas is exploiting the major market opportunity that FPGA provides.”
The development team behind the ForgeFPGA is the same group that introduced GreenPAK programmable mixed-signal devices at Silego Technology, part of Dialog Semiconductor, which Renesas acquired earlier in 2021. The new FPGAs will use the same business model and infrastructure as the successful GreenPAK line, which has shipped in the billions.
“We are eager to extend our leadership in the small, low-cost programmable market into FGPAs,” said Davin Lee, vice president of mixed-signal ad the Renesas IoT and infrastructure business unit in a statement. ForgeFPGA will appeal to customers large and small, he predicted.
Analyst Steve Leibson at Tirias Research said Renesas will be taking on a “long-ignored portion of the FPGA market” with ForgeFGPA, one that serves low-cost, low-power devices. “Renesas seems determined to repeat Silego’s previous success,” he said in a statement.
“Most automotive companies and some industrial would like to use FPGAs but Intel and Xilinx technology is too expensive for them,” said Kevin Anderson, a consultant and analyst at Write-Tek.
In fact, Leibson said Intel and Xilinx no longer seem to be interested in the low-end FGPA market. “These Renesas FPGAs represent no threat to the major players because they no longer play in this market,” he told Fierce Electronics.
RELATED: Xilinx unveils small Artix and Zynq hardware for IoT, industrial vision and more