Industry segments, perhaps is homebred the FPGA chip way out.

If do not have so much money to burn, not so many excellent engineers, no good relationship and wafer plant, don't want to have their own product positioning in high-end fields. Many segment market, domestic FPGA still has a lot of opportunities, as long as there is enough strength, have very good market positioning, domestic FPGA is also able to self-reliance.

"Like most of China's integrated circuit design company, we also very weak micro jager (Beijing), has been on the way of independent innovation trek." Recently, micro IC design companies in Beijing and operational difficulties caused no small vibration in the industry and the above is the company in an open letter in response to negative news.

From the media and Beijing and its disclosure of information, you can see that in the Beijing micro and really suffered a big setback, things still need to wait for observation.

For many users, however, may simply have never heard of Beijing and the company, never heard about what is the FPGA. Through Beijing and events, we might be able to realize the FPGA international competition environment of bad and strict technical barriers, to achieve localization of the chip breakthrough, resistance and long.

What is the FPGA

"The FPGA is the abbreviation of field programmable gate array (FPGA), it is a kind of logic circuit, is also one to meet the need of information processing chip type." A researcher at the Chinese academy of sciences institute of computing technology Zhang Peihang explained to the proceedings of the People's Republic of China press.

If from the perspective of information processing to classification, the chip can be roughly divided into three categories: CPU (central processing unit), FPGA (field programmable gate array), ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit).

"The CPU is the most common chips, you are most familiar." Zhang Peihang said. CPU core as a general purpose computer processing, it has the ability to deal with a variety of the directive, and is stored in external memory under the control of the program running, therefore, for information processing, the CPU is the most flexible and most common, but if it is used to deal with some kind of fixed algorithm, the CPU performance and efficiency is lower than can be.

ASIC is special, because it is customized, so fast, when its large-scale application value and efficiency ratio is very high, but the ASIC research and development costs are very high, and once production come out, its function cannot be modified.

"The FPGA between CPU and ASIC. Zhang Peihang said. The FPGA chip are the basis of a large number of default logic components and wiring resources, the user can change its connection relationship through online programming, when change the connection relationship, it has the function of a certain processing capacity.

As a kind of has a strong performance "processor", the FPGA is gradually occupied the important position in the field of application. According to the net friend of Lin says, the FPGA application field is very wide and very narrow. Wide because you need can be used in almost any field of digital circuit; Narrow because such as cost, power consumption, development difficulty, not dominant in every field.

Barriers in

Based on the characteristics of FPGA, the main application is in communication systems, industrial control, arms control, medical electronics, consumer electronics and other fields, for example, communication technical requirement to realize high speed and complex protocols, consumer electronics applications focuses on power consumption control, fast delivery, etc., these applications are of FPGA can do. In recent years, the FPGA is one of the most notable change trend of expanding its application field. Baidu attempt made AI proprietary FPGA chip, and implemented the first AI proprietary chip - baidu brain, which makes the baidu has become the global first applying FPGA scale one of the companies in the field of artificial intelligence.

High-profile iot also puts forward the general requirements for the chip. Highly flexible and have strong parallel processing ability of FPGA products can improve the throughput, shorten response time, improve the efficiency of energy, not only support to accelerate data analysis and control function, also can safely bridge development in the application of Internet of things all kinds of wired and wireless interface standard, is the key to meet the demand of the emerging Internet of things applications.

In 2014, according to data, FPGA markets around the world total $5 billion, with China's market share has reached $1.5 billion, accounting for one-third of the global market. According to the forecast analysis of institutions, by 2020, global FPGA market scale will reach $8.4 billion. Create the core ZhuChangHua chairman once told the media, with the Internet, cloud computing, cloud storage, industry driverless cars, 5 g communications industries such as the rise of the market prospect of the FPGA to be reckoned with.

FPGA barriers to entry are very high, however, the most active on the market at present four chip makers have spirit thought, altera, laidi, thought and love. The four companies build with nearly 9000 patents intellectual property barriers, largely blocked others after the road. In the past ten years, Intel, IBM, samsung and so on dozens of companies have been trying to set foot in the field, in addition to Intel $16.7 billion deal to buy altera successful foray into the field, the rest of the company are folded.

"Design is difficult, long development cycle, high technical requirements, production scale is small, these are the factors which restrict the development of the FPGA." Zhang Peihang said. Reported that net for wave green in the spring of blog mentioned in the article, in the spirit, and altera carve up the bulk of the market, low-end market and even dean, love desktop-and away, Beijing micro and natural on the way of independent research and development of FPGA.

Where to go

Horizon robot technology, the founder and chief executive of yu said to the reporter, the company is committed to development of robot deep learning, and on the FPGA, requires a high degree of "never use homebred the FPGA chip.

Zhang Peihang's research center, also with the spirit or altera FPGA chip of the two companies for high performance computer system research and development, and performance of reconfigurable computing, and other fields, "domestic FPGA chip may take the lead in the low-end market as".

Industry segments, perhaps is homebred the FPGA chip way out.

Product market positioning is very important. Internet growth in a signed article action: if do not have so much money to burn, not so many excellent engineers, no good relations of cooperation, and wafer factory don't want to have their own product positioning in high-end fields.

Positioning the low-end, FPGA developers must do some MCU (micro control unit) and DSP (digital signal processing (DSP) can't do something, make some achievements in the field of cross, such as patent algorithm, high-speed interface, a special process, the protocol stack and so on. Growth that these are the development strategy.

For the FPGA area, the whole ecological system construction is also very important. In addition to the chip itself also needs to develop the EDA (electronic design automation) tool, only by high-performance EDA tools can fully develop the potential of the FPGA chip.

Many market segments, domestic FPGA still has a lot of opportunities, growth, as long as there is enough strength, capable of supporting research and development spending, there is a very good market positioning, domestic FPGA is also able to self-reliance.