Looking to capture a bigger share of the automotive electronics market, Xilinx today announced a new family of FPGA and CPLD devices designed specifically to meet the strict requirements of the automotive industry.

Xilinx made the announcement at the Convergence conference and expo in Detroit, an event dedicated to electronics for the automotive market.

The San Jose-based company believes automotive represents a big opportunity for programmable logic. That's because the lifecycles of the electronics are very different from the lifecycles of the automobiles.

"Many consumer technologies are being integrated on a platform that has a disparate lifecycle and development cycle than other consumer electronics," said Robert Bielby, senior director of strategic marketing. "The cycle for a car is 1-6 years. Consumer is literally a year at best."

Additionally, Xilinx points out that market analyst firm ABI research says the worldwide markets for semiconductors for in-car audio, infotainment and driver information/telematics systems is forecast to more than double from $5.6 billion in 2003 to $12.8 billion in 2010. According to Frank Visquez, director of Automotive Technologies at ABI Research, the FPGA/CPLD revenue portion of this segment is expected to grow 94 percent from $240.3 million in 2003 to $449.3 million in 2010.

"Historically we haven't be able to compete in this market," said Bielby. "First, because of the stringent requirements of the automobile industry. And second, because our price points have not been consistent with automotive markets. But now our price points have come more consistent with automotive, and we meet the requirements."

The XA line of products consists of FPGAs and CPLD devices. Xilinx is also offering a suite of IP for the automotive market, including communications and connectivity cores such as controller area network (CAN) and local interconnect network (LIN) cores.  All of the XA devices are currently sampling.  Spartan 2 is the first device that will be introduced for the line, with the entire product family being rolled out next year.

Earlier this year, Xilinx announced an India development center, expected to grow to between 300 and 500 engineers over the next few years, that will be dedicated to developing IP for consumer and automotive markets.  Xilinx has also created an automotive business unit of 30 to 40 people dedicated to the automotive market.

By: DocMemory
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