CIE Components in Electronics
Achronix has announced that its revenues will grow over 700 per cent year-over-year and will exceed $100M in 2017. Achronix’s exceptional growth is driven primarily by sales of its Speedster22i FPGA family and licensing of its Speedcore embedded FPGA (eFPGA) IP products. Achronix revenues began to significantly ramp in 2016 and the company reached profitability in Q1 2017. As a result of its strong revenue growth and new design activity, Achronix plans to expand its headcount in three key locations:
– Santa Clara, USA: Worldwide Headquarters
– Bangalore, India: Hardware and Software Development
– Shanghai & Beijing, China: Sales and Technical Support
The additional headcount will enable Achronix to accelerate its investment in innovative technologies that will further differentiate its products and continue to drive growth. Achronix plans to increase its total headcount by 35 per cent by the end of 2017.
“2017 is a breakout growth year, which establishes Achronix as one of the fastest growing semiconductor companies in the world. We are experiencing strong customer demand for both our Speedster FPGAs as well as our newer Speedcore embedded FPGA in hardware accelerator applications. We are looking for new talent to complement a very strong core team to continue delivering highly innovative silicon and software products,” said Robert Blake, president and CEO, Achronix Semiconductor. “Looking forward, we are entering a new high growth era where our customised core FPGA technology can accelerate a broad range of complex compute tasks in machine learning, artificial intelligence, software defined networks and 5G base stations.”
The fastest growth segment in the semiconductor industry is hardware accelerator devices that offload CPU data processing and super charge system performance. This segment is expected to grow over 60 per cent per year through 2020 driven primarily, by programmable solutions to implement algorithm changes that will be needed to optimise performance for years to come. Of the various programmable architectural options, FPGAs with their ability to create massively parallel structures are the lowest power and the highest performance solutions.
All of Achronix product lines are built for hardware acceleration applications:
· Speedster standalone FPGAs: The Speedster22i FPGA family is a high- performance and high-density family built on 22nm FinFET technology that offers device densities up to 1 million effective LUTs and embedded hard IP for communications applications. Speedster22i devices began shipping in 2013 and moved into production in 2015. Achronix’s next generation Speedster family will be available in 2018 and will be a blend of FPGA and hardened accelerator structures that offer highest performance and lowest power solutions for CPU offload for data center and enterprise applications.
· Speedcore eFPGAs: Based on the same proven high-performance, high-density architecture as Speedster FPGAs, Speedcore is in production on TSMC 16FF+. Achronix began shipping Speedcore eFPGA IP to customers in 2016 and is ramping significantly in 2017 based on demand in data center HPC applications, wireless infrastructure, networking infrastructure and automotive ADAS and AD systems. Achronix is developing its next generation Speedcore architecture that will be available on TSMC’s 7nm process technology and will be available for design starts in 2H 2017.
· SpeedchipTM FPGA-based accelerator chiplets: Achronix is currently working with several companies to define and build custom FPGA-based chiplets for 2.5D package integration. Companies interested in Speedchip chiplets are asked to contact Achronix for more details.
· ACE design tools: All of Achronix FPGA products are supported by Achronix’s best-in-class design tools called ACE. Achronix will continue to add features and enhance functionality to support FPGA-based acceleration applications.
Achronix products target applications in accelerator markets
The enormous data and computational requirements from Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems such as machine learning, deep learning, computer and embedded vision, along with 5G wireless infrastructure are driving the market for hardware accelerator devices that offload CPU data processing and super charge system performance. FPGAs, with their ability to create massively parallel structures as hardware accelerator devices, can be reprogrammed to support changing algorithms and are the lowest power and highest performance programmable hardware accelerators. Speedcore eFPGA delivers further performance acceleration with 10x lower latency and 10x higher bandwidth compared to standalone FPGAs. Speedcore is currently being used or evaluated for high performance acceleration systems including data center acceleration, automotive ADAS, database acceleration, and 5G wireless infrastructure.
