At FPGA Camp it was not Xilinx v/s Altera v/s Lattice Semiconductor

At the recently held FPGA Camp in Bangalore, the 1,2,3 vendors of FPGA industry namely Xilinx, Altera and Lattice Semiconductor were not seen so much as competing to influence design engineers in using their products, but it was more of a joint effort to spread the use of FPGA in India.

If we look at India's semiconductor space, its overwhelmingly design services, that too more in embedded systems. Embedded systems designers see FPGA playing increasingly important role in designing embedded boards. FPGA is no more a VLSI subject now it's fully embedded inside embedded system product. Lot of attendees shared the significant benefits they reaped in different applications. Few suggested including FPGA as a separate subject in under-graduation electronics engineering syllabus but strictly a vendor neutral basis.

At FPGA camp, all these three top FPGA vendors have provided both commercial and technical guidance with an objective of making FPGA more popular among designers. All these three look to be in team to compete with ASSP semiconductor vendors, that too more with the off-the-shelf DSP vendor such as Texas Instruments, Freescale Semiconductor, and Analog Devices.

With the participation of more than 400 serious design engineers, FPGA Camp was an indication of growing population of FPGA users in India.

Except for the large volume products there was no any negative word about FPGA by the attendees. India is going to be an excellent market for FPGA. However at the end there was a clear opinion that ASSP devices cannot be replaced by FPGA in mass applications.