FPGA race: Xilinx'16nm vs Altera'14nm turns into TSMC vs Intel foundry

In the hot FPGA market, the chain of technology achievements and design-support (all forms) are the key parameters of success. One is in the form of IP and patents and another in the form network of talented design support team, and the powerful design software, help protect the well established FPGA vendors from new emerging players entering this market. Xilinx and Altera having these strengths to dominate the market so that the new players like Achronix and Tabula have uphill task in creating any impact in the market. The new players who want play the game on the cost factor are also restricted by low cost FPGA vendor Lattice Semiconductor. It's the support-IP and design-software and established relation with customer is the hard to break thing for new players. The Vivado FPGA design software from Xilinx which is nearly offered for free is as good as best EDA software in the world for FPGA related chip design tasks. The cache of IP offered by Xilinx is tough to match by any other FPGA players in the market. Altera, the closest competitor to Xilinx has some of the similar strengths to Xilinx but still lags. The only area very recentry Altera try to beat Xilinx is in the node race, where it got access to Intel's 14nm FinFET technology. Infact the new player Achronix also got access to Intel fab for its FPGAs. Xilinx has announced 16nm FPGA chips to be built on TSMC’s 16-n...