Altera outgrew the semiconductor industry by almost 2x over the last four years and outgrew the ASSP market by 3x,says John Daane,CEO of Altera.
The driver of Altera's growth is the increasing cost of ASSP."Companies are spending$100m to implement a design in 28nm,"says Daane,"you need$500m in revenues to justify that and most applications do not have the revenue to meet these costs."
And that's an argument for using programmables"Our strongest growth is in networking,computer and storage-they now represent 17%of the company,"says Daane.
Altera is making a precocious play in 20nm announcing product for next year and volume availability of 20nm product in 2014.
Altera claims its 20nm product will have a'total power'improvement,a phrase meaning the sum of active power improvement plus static power improvement,of 60%over 28nm products.
Asked how that could be achieved on a process which is expected to be power hungry,Vince Hu,vp for product and corporate marketing at Altera,says:"more than half of that comes from design."
The TSMC 20nm,which both Altera and Xilinx will use,is expected to be power hungry,according to Professor Asen Asenov of Glasgow University who is CEO of Gold Standard Simulations.
"My understanding is that 20nm will be a power hungry node,"says Asenov,"only the big players with high performance products will consider it.The rest will stay with 28nm as long as possible or until better finfet options become available."
Altera's intention is to launch 20nm product next year with volume production in 2014.However it is also working on product which will use TSMC's 16nm finfet process.
At the sme time it is,according to Altera's CTO,Misha Burich,keeping a watchful eye on FD-SOI as a possible way to go.
