Holt told the programmable logic design line reporter that Achronix has never laid off employees in the past and will not lay off employees in the future. He said that in fact, the company is expanding its scale and introducing more talents. At present, the company has more than 90 employees. He also revealed that the company is expected to exceed its sales target in 2009, which is about "single-digit million-dollar level".
Achronix is one of the outstanding new FGPA companies in recent years. And more new FPGA companies are thought to follow the footsteps of Ambric and Mathstar, and close down or be acquired one after another.
Achronix has two main product lines. The most interesting thing is that one of the commercial FPGA lines is named Speedster. According to the company, the highest frequency of this product series will reach 1.5GHz, which is faster than all other FGPA frequencies. Other product lines of Speedster and Achronix can be applied to the environment with high radiation and bad temperature, and the throughput of traditional FPGA can be doubled by using our patented technology picoPIPE.
Achronix said that pipoPIPE can speed up the passage of numbers in FPGA structure. By using a simple handshake protocol to control the data flow, the whole process does not need a global clock. Although the internal work of devices is fundamentally different, hardware description languages, such as RTL, can be used in design.
Rich Wawrzyniak, a senior analyst at Semico Research, said, "They are doing something unique in the FGPA industry. If their (income) goals are set low, I believe they will succeed easily. "
"Essentially a software company"
Wawrzyniak believes that Achronix's Speedster product line with the highest frequency of 1.5-GHz enables designers to choose to use FPGA in some applications where FPGA is not available traditionally, or at least seriously consider it. "Now, Achronix has some products that designers can use when doing the above work."
But Achronix CEO Holt said that apart from allowing designers to use RTL as design input, Achronix also has a "familiar tool" strategy. This purpose will enable FPGA designers to use Achronix products like some traditional FGPA designs. The early FGPA new company failed because it required designers to learn some new tools and methods.
Achronix has cooperated with Mentor and Synopsys for many years with OEM tools. The company's back-end ACE tool, a complete physical implementation platform, including layout, routing, timing analysis and critical path analysis, uses the "familiar tools" strategy, which looks no different from the existing FGPA tools.
A source working in an FPGA supplier said that he hasn't seen Achronix's tools yet, but he is very skeptical about the slogan of "familiar tools" because the pipeline technology of this device is different from the structure of traditional FPGA.
Holt said, "Essentially, we are a software company" and emphasized the importance of "choosing the right tools". The company has not disclosed how many customers this design has attracted, or the names of these customers, but it has received many orders.
The goal is the high-end route.
Achronix, like another new FPGA company, Cswitch, is positioned in the high-end market of FPGA products. This may be a very risky positioning, because many communication infrastructure companies and other OEM companies have either postponed or cancelled many projects.
Jim Feldhan, president of Semico, said that Speedster has huge market opportunities. He said that many new companies will struggle during the economic recession, not because their products are not excellent, but because there are fewer and fewer new system designs known at present. Semico's market performance will improve next year. He said that based on the expectation of economic improvement, many companies have started new design work.
Holt was responsible for leading a management technical consulting team before he founded Achronix as one of the early co-founders. He said that Achronix is avoiding the mistake that many high-tech companies encounter, that is, planning according to unrealistic growth rates. Achronix's revenue forecast is very conservative, and the whole cycle from design order to product production is calculated according to 12- 18 months (he said this is the average level of the company).
He emphasized that the company's venture capitalists, including Argonaut Private Equity Fund, Battery Venture Capital, New Science Venture Capital, Easton Capital and Entrepia Venture Capital, all have rich experience in the fields of semiconductors and life sciences, and they don't expect to make quick profits.
Achronix's initial target markets are telecommunications, networks, digital signal processing, test and measurement, high-performance computing and security/encryption. Holt said that the company will not compete directly with Xilinx and Altera. Although these companies dominate the FPGA market, Achronix will focus on other market segments.
Achronix began shipping the first batch of Speedster products last year. Holt said that the company also reached a cooperation agreement with BAE Systems in 2007 to jointly develop reconfigurable radiation-resistant FPGA.
Achronix received $86.3 million in two rounds of financing. In June last year, 5438+ 10, the company announced that it had obtained 5265438+ million yuan of Class B financing. The FPGA of Achronix Company can be traced back to a basic technology developed from Cornell University 1994 to 2004, and the company was founded in 2004.