Industry Semiconductors Number of employees <200 Headquarters San Jose Type of business Private | Products FPGA Website www.achronix.com Founded 2004 | |
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Key people Robert Blake (CEO), John Lofton Holt (Chairman), Virantha Ekanayake (CTO), Chris Pelosi (VP HW Engineering), Kamal Choudhary (Sr. VP SW Engineering), Raymond Nijssen (VP System Engineering), Randy Jurrat (VP of Operations), Steve Mensor (VP Marketing),Steve Dodsworth (VP Sales), | ||
Achronix Semiconductor is a fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California with an additional R&D facility in Bangalore, India, and an additional sales office in Shenzhen, China. Achronix is a diversified fabless semiconductor company that sells high-end FPGA products, embedded FPGA products, system-level products and supporting design tools. Achronix was founded in 2004 in Ithaca, New York based on technology licensed from Cornell University. The company has been a consistent technology innovator in the FPGA market since moving its headquarters to Silicon Valley in 2006. Achronix has been prominently featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and hundreds of global technology publications.
Contents
- Speedster FPGAs
- Embedded FPGA IPs
- System level Products
- Achronix CAD Environment ACE Design Tools
- References
Achronix was originally self-funded by several million dollars of founder’s capital. Since 2006, Achronix has been funded by a combination of venture capital funding, private equity funding and debt from traditional lenders. Since Achronix is a private company, the total amount of capital raised to date has not been disclosed, but the total amount of capital raised is thought to be in the $180M-$200M range.
Speedster FPGAs
Achronix introduced its first FPGA product family called Speedster™ in 2008. Speedster was a high-performance FPGA product that claimed clock speeds that exceeded 1.5Ghz, while providing high-end hardened interfaces with 10Gbps performance. At that time, 10Gbps performance was considered state-of-the-art. The original Speedster product was built on 65 nm technology with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC), which was the most advanced semiconductor technology available at the time. As sales of Speedster FPGAs grew, Achronix continued to invest in R&D, building prototype FPGAs in TSMC 28 nm and other advanced process technologies. In November 2010, Achronix closed a historic deal with Intel Corporation to be the first customer of Intel Custom Foundry (ICF), leveraging Intel’s 22 nm manufacturing process. At the time, the 22 nm manufacturing process was the most advanced in the world and offered Achronix significant advantages. In 2012, Achronix rolled out its second production FPGA product called Speedster22i. The Speedster22i devices were the first high-end FPGAs that offered hardened IP for high performance wireline applications. Speedster22i FPGAs are in high volume production today and it is believed that Achronix has achieved profitability through the sales of these FPGAs and other products. Achronix continues to invest heavily in the most advanced process technologies for next generation FPGA products.
Embedded FPGA IPs
In 2012, Achronix began investing in an embedded FPGA product, which would sell FPGA technology as an IP core to System-on-Chip (SOC) and Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) customers. This investment was designed to allow Achronix to expand its already-successful FPGA chip business into adjacent markets. In 2016, Achronix formally expanded its FPGA product offering with the announcement that it had begun shipping Speedcore™ embedded FPGA technology (eFPGA) to customers. The first Speedcore customers received cores that were built on 16 nm technology from TSMC. Achronix is the only company that has shipped eFPGA technology to customers for production applications. Due to the rapid adoption of the product, Speedcore is believed to be Achronix’s fastest growing product family ever. In alignment with investments for the mainstream chip business, Achronix continues to invest in other advanced process technologies for future eFPGA products.
System-level Products
In 2016, Achronix announced the immediate availability of its PCIe Accelerator-6D board for network and compute acceleration applications. The Accelerator-6D board is the industry’s highest memory bandwidth FPGA-based PCIe add-in card for high-speed data center acceleration applications. The board integrates a Speedster22i HD1000 FPGA with 700,000 look-up-tables that connects to six independent memory controllers allowing for up to 192 GB of memory and 690 Gbps of total memory bandwidth.
Achronix CAD Environment (ACE) Design Tools
A significant part of Achronix’s success in the FPGA market is due to its powerful and easy-to-use design tools called ACE.The Achronix ACE design tools deliver the industry’s best-in-class quality-of-results for performance and compile times. Additionally, the ACE design tools offer a broad suite of powerful features for optimizing designs for performance and area. It is believed that at least 25-30% of Achronix R&D spending is in the area of software R&D for ACE.