Why Are Xilinx So Desirable As A Supplier Of Digital Circuitry

Xilinx parts are some of the most sought-after in the world of FPGAs, and for good reason. They are useful as learning tools, and they are popular in the world of industry as well.  Most engineers will get exposed to Field Programmable Gate Arrays in college. These tools can be bewildering. They are hard to understand even if you are an experienced programmer with a background in logic and circuit design, because they use a different paradigm for code.

Finding the right tools for learning and development can help with that. If you’re not familiar with Xilinx, then it’s likely you’re reading this as someone who has some experience in the world of programming, but who is not an engineer. Perhaps you’re one of the new breed of makers. FPGAs are ubiquitous in the world of traditional engineering, but they haven’t quite made it over to the world of DIY projects, yet. This means that there’s not a whole lot of information out there about the concept of Non-Procedural Programming. The documentation that is out there is opaque, and VHDL is simply confusing to construct.

Learning Circuits and Production FPGAs

There are some companies that are pioneering the idea of DIY development, and trying to make the job easier. Jack Gassett made the Papilio, and Justin Rajewski has made the Mojo, two great boards that help people transition from things like the Arduino and the RaspberryPi, both light introductions to the world of tinkering with electronics, hardware and software.

These FPGAs are based on the Xilinx Spartan chip. They have plenty of expansion ports, which means that someone who has some experience with electronics could get a lot out of working with them. The Papilio and the Mojo are both well supported, and there are lots of tutorials out there to help people learn how to use them.

Why choose an Xilinx board, though? Well, Xilinx is a company with good prospects that has huge adoption in the world of industry. The company is clearly built for growth, and this is something that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Share prices are high and rising, and the company is projecting quarterly revenues in excess of $600 million.

Xilinx is focused on the FPGA chip market, and they have not just low end/learning products such as the low-cost Spartan boards, the yhave advanced products such as the UltraScale, UltraScale+ and their new performance-focused 7-series boards. These products account for more than half of the company’s top line, and that is growing too.  The Zynq programmable chip saw a huge increase in sales in 2017 and is not showing any sign of losing momentum. That chip is popular in the automotive space, and as cars become more and more sophisticated sales can only be expected to increase.

Optimized FPGAs for Any Market

FPGAs are optimized to offer the best performance possible for a number of applications. The idea of them is that they can be programmed after shipping and do jobs that a CPU or GPU cannot do well, because those chips have a fixed architecture that does just one highly specific job. FPGAs are slower than the average CPU in terms of cycles, but none of those cycles are wasted when the chip is well coded.

Auto-makers and component suppliers are turning towards FPGAs because they are multi-purpose and they have a low power and heat footprint. They offer a cost effective way of doing a huge number of different jobs well. Xilinx is not the only competitor in the FPGA space, but they have done a good job of cornering some markets, with them becoming the second-ranked supplier in the ADAS space, with product shipment growing year after year.

High Performance Cloud Computing

In previous years, it was the cloud that was the dominant force for Linux, but the market for communications and data center chips has started to slow down. Xilinx has some huge clients in the cloud computing space. Amazon Web Services, Alibaba and Huawei all use Xilinx FPGAs to give their infrastructure a boost. Those companies have chosen Xilinx because their FPGAs offer strong performance per watt, which means that in a large scale data center the power consumption savings will quickly mount up.

FPGA deployment in data centers has been increasing steadily every year, and that trend is expected to continue for several more years. By 2025 it is thought that FPGA deployments will match those of CPUs.

A Tech Lead Over Intel

Intel Corporation is one of the clear market leaders in the world of CPUs, but they are struggling in the FPGA world, where rivals such as Altera and Xilinx are clearly in the lead. Intel had partnered with Altera back in 2013, but within just a few years that partnership was ailing. By 2016, Xilinx was well ahead in terms of the technology that they offered.  Today, Intel is focusing on improving its FPGA product offerings. The Stratix 10 chip went a long way towards maintaining the company’s relevance, but Xilinx has a wider range of viable offerings on different technologies, with low power footprint and high performance offerings to support almost any use case.

Xilinx was the first company to release a 14/16-nanometer FPGA. Intel may be able to make the claim that their 14 nanometer technology is superior, at least in terms of density, but so far it has not been able to make effective use of that increased density. It took them a long time to go from sampling to mass shipments, and in that time period Xilinx was able to gain a significant lead in terms of established customers.   In industrial environments, it’s important that developers know what they are getting and have confidence in the technology.

Businesses do not have the time to invest in learning new architectures every couple of years. Once a company has established themselves as a valuable supplier such as Directics.com, they are in a strong position to remain that way, and Xilinx has done a stunning job in that regard.