Opinion

Imagine for a minute that you wake up one day and you realize that you have a superpower — like the ability to fly. Well, that’s a bit like how I felt when I started using Claude Code about a month ago. Since then, when I talk and write about my experiences with this amazing new tool, I find myself trying to hold back my excitement, trying not to look like a crazy person. It’s like I feel the ground shaking beneath my feet while I see other people around me going about their lives as usual. I would tell people that this is huge, that it has flipped the tables on my work and the whole tech industry — but I’d see that they were not as shocked as I was. Claude Code was blowing my mind. The truth is that it has completely changed the way I work, at least when it comes to one big part of my work, and I struggle to imagine ever going back.

Since the release of the Series 7 devices from Xilinx in 2011, one member of the family is clearly dominating the others in terms of popularity: the Zynq-7000 SoC. Did Xilinx put all their marketing efforts into the Zynq or is this proof of a new trend in FPGA technology?

To answer that question let me talk about why I think the Zynq SoC has been so popular.

1. The Zynq bridges a gap in the market for high-performance, calculation-intensive devices. In this market, there are generally three types of implementations: microprocessor based solutions (software solutions), FPGA based solutions (hardware solutions) and a combination of both. Most people accept that (at least in theory) the highest performance and energy efficient implementation of most calculation-intensive algorithms is achieved on FPGA technology. The problem is that FPGA designers are hard to find and creating one internally takes a lot of time. Another problem is that the open-source community for IP cores is not very developed, at least in comparison to open-source software. The Zynq SoC bridges that gap by providing a powerful microprocessor based solution, while offering the possibility to accelerate the implementation through hardware offloading to an on-chip FPGA. With the Zynq, a customer can port their existing application to run on the ARM processor, without the need for an FPGA designer. Once the application has been proven on the Zynq, they can then gradually develop the FPGA part of the chip and explore the possibilities for hardware acceleration.

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With the top two FPGA companies taking up 89% of the FPGA market, you can be forgiven for thinking there was no one else out there. Xilinx and Altera have done a good job of defending the duopoly but a few companies are gradually winning market share by targeting specific applications and sub-markets. Here is a list of the top 5 FPGA companies by revenue.

Chart: FPGA Market Share by 2010 revenue in Millions of USDDescription: This chart compares the 2010 revenues of Xilinx, Altera, Lattice Semiconductor, Microsemi and QuickLogic companies. The data represents millions of US dollars.Tags: fpga,companies,xilinx,altera,lattice semi,microsemi,quicklogic,revenue,comparisoncharts powered by iCharts

I recently read an interesting article on Xilinx’s position with respect to its competitors: Is Xilinx Good Enough for You? As someone who works mainly with Xilinx FPGAs, I find it important to know how they are faring competitively. If one day a competitor manages to blow Xilinx out of the water, I would like to have seen it coming.

The image below was taken from Google Trends and shows Google search results for Xilinx and Altera. Clearly, search volume for Altera has overtaken that for Xilinx and the spread seems to be growing.