Top 4 FPGA Manufacturers in the US (Xili FPGAnx 7 Series FPGA )

Introduction

FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrayis) is currently one of the mainstream platforms for the world's most widely used digital systems. Its market prospects are attractive, but the threshold is unmatched in the chip industry. There are currently four major FPGA manufacturers. And they are all in the United States. Here are the introductions:

Figure 1- FPGA Manufacturers

Table of contents

1. Top1：Xilinx

Xilinx is a manufacturer of integrated circuits. You may ask, why are integrated circuits so important? They are responsible for making everything work better, faster, and use less energy. This is ideal because technology is evolving rapidly and we don't always want to drain the battery all the time.  Xilinx is the world's leading provider of complete programmable logic solutions and is currently the number one FPGA solution provider.

Development tools: Vivado and ISE.

ISE is an old development software and has basically been replaced by Vivado. Only some FPGAs produced by Xilinx more than ten years ago were developed using ISE. New FPGAs all support the more useful Vivado.

FPGA products include the following parts:

1. Spartan series: Positioned in the low-end market. The latest device is Spartan7, which is a 28nm process. Spartan6 used to be a 45nm process. This series of devices is affordable and has a relatively small logic scale.

2. Artix series: Xilinx launches the Artix series FPGA products. Its purpose should be as a transition product between low-end Spartan and mid-to-high-end Kintex series FPGAs. Especially in terms of communication interfaces, the Artix series has great advantages over Spartan. Therefore, if the design Not only needs logic resources, but you need advanced high-speed interfaces, you may wish to consider the Artix series.

3. The Kintex and Virtex series are Xilinx's mid-to-high-end products, including the 28nm Kintex7 and Virtex7 series, the 20nm Kintex7 Ultrascale and Virtex7 Ultrascale series, and the 16nm Kintex7 Ultrascale+ and Virtex7 Ultrascale+ series. It has a wealth of high-speed interfaces and is mainly used in high-end fields such as communications, radar, signal processing, and IC verification.

4. Fully programmable SoC and MPSoC series, including Zynq-7000 and Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC series FPGA, with embedded ARM Cortex series CPU cores.

2. Top2：Altera

The company was founded in 1984 and is located in California. Since 1984, they have continued to produce high-quality products and have become one of the best-known companies in the world. Altera Corporation produces FPGAs for many different purposes. These include industrial automation, microprocessors, and consumer electronics.

The FPGA supplier that is as famous as Xilinx in the industry was acquired by Intel, the giant in the CPU chip field, in 2015, so it is now also called Intel's FPGA.

Figure2-Altera

Development tools: QuartusII

Product Series:

1. MAXII series

The MAXII series is a CPLD, and Altera is famous for its CPLD.

2. Cyclone series

The latest one is Cyclone10, which is cost-effective and similar to Xilinx's Spartan series and Artix series.

3. Stratix series

The latest is Stratix10, which is a high-end application and competes with Xilinx's Kintex and Virtex series.

4. Arria series

SOC series FPGA, built-in ARM Cotex A9 core.

5. Intel’s new product Arria 10 FPGA series

FPGA supporting DDR4 memory interface. Hardware designers can now use the latest Quartus II software v14.1 to implement DDR4 data reading and writing in Arria10 FPGA and SoC designs.

3. Top3：Lattice Semiconductor

Another very influential company in the FPGA space is Lattice Semiconductor. The company was founded in 1997 and quickly became one of the top FPGA manufacturers.

Lattice Semiconductor specializes in manufacturing products that are too complex for a single company to produce. These include chips made specifically to meet specific company needs. However, lattice has also been very successful in producing adaptable chips that can be used in many different applications. This is why they are a top FPGA manufacturer. They make chips useful in everything from high-tech medical equipment to workstations and even graphics cards. It is a well-known provider of programmable logic solutions, second only to Xilinx and Altera.

Development tools: ISPLEVER

Product Series:

1. The ECP series is an FPGA series developed by Lattice itself, providing low-cost, high-density FPGA solutions, and also has high-speed Serdes and other interfaces, which are mostly suitable for civilian solutions.
2. The ICE series is an ultra-low-power FPGA acquired from SilioncBlue. It has also been used in the iPhone, realizing the first application of FPGA in consumer products, which shows how low its power consumption is.
3. Mach series replaces CPLD and is the best choice to implement glue logic. As the inventor of CPLD, Lattice still excels in the field of CPLD.

4. Top 4：Microsemi

Microsemi acquired Actel, focusing on the US military and aerospace fields. Its products are mainly anti-fuse structure FPGAs and Flash-based FPGAs, which have the advantages of radiation resistance and high reliability. Recently, Microsemi was acquired by Microchip.

The company was founded in 1983, making it one of the oldest companies on this list. This means the company has had plenty of time to perfect their product, which is why they are so successful now.

Unlike Altera and Xilinx, Microsemi doesn't make FPGAs that serve any purpose. Instead, they are more focused on providing products for military applications and scientific applications. That's why many of their products are often helpful for government contracts and research efforts.

Microsemi has partnered with Qualcomm, a very influential communications company. They also have their own family of FPGAs called SmartFusion. Microsemi has released a new version of the series, called SmartFusion2. That's because the technology in these chips has advanced significantly since the first versions were released. The company was founded in 1983, making it one of the oldest companies on this list. This means the company has had plenty of time to perfect their product, which is why they are so successful now.

Unlike Altera and Xilinx, Microsemi doesn't make FPGAs that serve any purpose. Instead, they are more focused on providing products for military applications and scientific applications. That's why many of their products are often helpful for government contracts and research efforts.

Microsemi has partnered with Qualcomm, a very influential communications company. They also have their own family of FPGAs called SmartFusion. Microsemi has released a new version of the series, called SmartFusion2. That's because the technology in these chips has advanced significantly since the first versions were released.

Development tools: Libero

Product Series：

FLASH-based general FPGA series, including three high-end, mid-range and low-end series: PolarFireMid-Range FPGAs, RTG4Radiation-Tolerant FPGAs, and IGLOO2Low-Density FPGAs.

Figure3-FPGA

Conclusion

The embedded FPGA market is growing. This is a result of more businesses and people becoming aware of the advantages of utilizing FPGAs. As a result, there ought to be more providers. As a result, the market for embedded FPGA is always growing. It will be interesting to watch how these markets grow in the near future.

Suppose you are trying to find an FPGA development kit that is embedded. In this situation, you ought to seek out a dealer who backs their merchandise. They ought to offer a means of overcoming the difficulties involved in developing embedded FPGAs.

FPGAs are incorporated into the application development tool chains of Altera and Xilinx. This implies we can use different CPUs and microcontrollers to program the FPGA. Thus, you need to think about utilizing an embedded FPGA development kit while developing a new embedded application.