John C,
Automotive is happening (big) right now.
Latest (can't say which) luxury car has 10+ Xilinx FPGAs in it.
One car.
10+ FPGAs.
Replaced all the microcontrollers.
Why? Because the microcontrollers can not be maintained for ten years, whereas the car maker can always buy any future version of our FPGA, and put their old VHDL/verilog into it. Maintaining stock for all cars sold for replacement assemblies for ten years was driving the maker broke (pun intended).
Consumer is going gangbusters. LCD TV's, plasma panel TV's. Why?
Because ASICs are a bad investment. The actual number of TVs sold for each country is small compared to the overall numbers. Each country is just slightly different. The TVs change every six months. So making TVs for Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, etc. etc. is a huge headache. And if the ASIC doesn't work, the risk is enormous.
PC's?
Already there, but it is small compared to everything else. We are in video display cards (I have one in my home PC, which can drive two displays at once, and the mouse will go from one to the next...). We are in high end accelerator cards, instrumentation cards, etc. Still like to see more business here, and it will happen with PCI express which is just starting to ramp now.
Military/Aerospace
Huge growth here. Why? Because ASICs are really pretty much dead for this market. Not because of cost (which helps), but because of reprogramability. The "mission" changes, and thus if the entire jet fighter is "soft" or "firm" it can be reprogrammed...
And there is the software defined radio retrofit of all military forces for all allies and their partners (read the whole world, pretty much) and the homeland security need to retrofit all public safety (police fire medical) radios to interoperate with the military...
Embedded systems
Everywhere there is a processor + stuff. A 20 billion $ market, which we are able to contribute to. More than 40% of it is Power PC based. So we play well here, and add a lot of value with our EMACs, APU interface, 405PPC, and thousands of programmable CLBs.
'Extreme' DSP
Anytime you can't solve the problem with a DSP processor. Or when you need peripherals for a DSP processor (you then use a FPGA instead). Another 20 billion $ market which we play in the top end of. Cell phone base stations, medical scanners, so on and so forth.
Looks like there is growth (for us), and lots of it, in our future.
Of course, that is our perspective, which is from where we sit, and what we see happening. Others will have their view.
Austin