Why No Process Shrink On Prior FPGA Devices ?

David,

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It is a bit hard to swallow, but if you really are interested, you have to read their entire plan (conspiracy theory is a good analogy -- it really is a plain in view world wide conspiracy!).

And, not just Xilinx must follow: the equipment Intel, ST Micro, TI, IBM, UMC, TSMC, etc all buy comes from the same "roadmap."

If it isn't in the roadmap, well, it has no support, and eventually, it will not exist.

Now, that may be too harsh, as some technology variants (such as 3-D circuits, a la Matrix Semi, purchased by SanDisk) did make use of the existing roadmap, with some minor tweaks. Even there, is this profitable? The jury is still out.

As for what to invest in? Wow. As an engineer I made a rule for myself: let someone else do the investing! My judgment in that regard has been proven to be absolutely TERRIBLE. Any engineer who thinks they are a good investor, I haven't seen one yet! It is hard enough to stay current and be an expert in what I am supposed to be an expert in, let alone deciding to be an expert in something unrelated.

Good luck,

Austin

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Austin Lesea
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Austin Lesea schrieb:

Actually the semiconductor roadmap is the best example of a selffulfilling prophecy that I ever encountered. It is a widely accepted estimate of how fast semiconductor technology will progress.

The cost with semicon manufacturing is almost completely in R&D and building the fab and the livetime of a technology node is very short. This means that progressing faster than the competitors is EXTREMELY expensive. For beeing faster you need more R&D and at the same time you have less time to pay for the R&D of your previous technology.

On the other hand, beeing slower than you competitors can also be very expensive because the same chip can be manufactured cheaper in the newer technolgy and at the same time will be faster.

This situation is similar for many technologies, and technology progress will vary from company to company because nobody knows the speed of the competitors. But for semicon the costs are extreme, and there is this convenient roadmap that everybody seems to have agreed on. For that reason semiconductor progress is more or less in sync between all manufacturers.

Kolja Sulimma

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Kolja Sulimma

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Peter Alfke

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