FPGA chips have a huge stock market and a trend of incremental market.
With the rapid development of Internet of things, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other fields, FPGA chip has ushered in its own spring; The development of FPGA involves chip core architecture, advanced technology, various IP designs, EDA tool development, system integration and other aspects, and the technical difficulty is very high; At present, domestic substitutes have made breakthroughs in the field of low logic units, and there is an urgent demand for medium and high-end products with high reliability and high logic units.
Due to the in-depth research and forward-looking judgment of the industry, red dot China began to lay out the chip track early. It has invested in two leading enterprises, Suiyuan technology and Hanbo semiconductor, in the field of ASIC chips, and is also very optimistic about the future prospects of FPGA chips.
The following is the industry observation of red dot China Gao LinSong. The article focuses on the overview, industry application, market space and industry pattern of FPGA, analyzes the development trend and potential opportunities of FPGA layer by layer, and hopes to bring you valuable views to share.
Red dot view: FPGA chips have a huge stock market and a trend of incremental market; Due to the lack of high-end products and positive design in China, the security of chip supply chain will be affected; The technical barriers are high, requiring experienced teams, involving many directions (software, hardware, IP, etc.), requiring the support of a large team, and there are few experienced personnel in the industry.
1、 FPGA overview
1. basic overview
The full name of FPGA is field programmable gate array, which means field programmable logic gate array. So the biggest characteristic of FPGA chip is field programmability. Whether it is CPU, GPU, DSP, memory or various ASIC chips, after the chips are manufactured, the functions of the chips have been fixed, and users cannot modify their hardware functions. After the FPGA chip is manufactured, its function is not fixed. Users can configure the function of the FPGA chip through the special EDA software provided by the FPGA chip company according to their actual needs, so as to convert the blank FPGA chip into an integrated circuit chip with specific functions.
Each FPGA chip can be configured with different functions for many times to realize different functions. Therefore, as far as FPGA chip companies are concerned, they not only need to provide chips, but also need to provide FPGA specific EDA software to configure the chips.
FPGA chip companies are not only integrated circuit design enterprises, but also integrated circuit EDA software enterprises.
2. FPGA classification
FPGA manufacturers mainly provide FPGA chips based on two types of technologies:
Flash technology: it has non-volatile characteristics, that is, the stored data will not disappear after the current is turned off; The write operation is complex, and the write cycle is longer than that of SRAM, and the write input voltage is higher; However, it has low power consumption, high confidentiality and strong radiation resistance, and is mostly used in military industry and aerospace.
SRAM Technology (static random access memory): it does not have nonvolatile characteristics and is the most widely used architecture; FPGA is rarely used in mobile devices and has more or less security measures, so the advantage of flash is not obvious; Most mainstream FPGAs use SRAM, which is configured with independent flash memory to store configuration information when powered on.
3. use of FPGA
FPGA chip users will give a specific description of the functions to be realized by the FPGA chip according to the products they want to develop. This description is usually written in Verilog or VHDL. The input of EDA software for FPGA is the function description file provided by the user.
The first step is logic synthesis, which transforms the user's function expression into logical units suitable for the chip structure and the connection relationship between these units.
The second step, called physical implementation, is to allocate the circuit devices synthesized by logic to different positions within the FPGA, and allocate the connection switches in the chip structure according to the connection information, including physical layout, wiring and optimization. After the physical implementation step, the software system determines the programming information and connection information of all FPGA programmable units, which are represented by binary bit stream data.
The last step is called programming download, which is to program and write the bit stream information determined by the physical implementation into the chip through the download port of the FPGA chip itself in a specific way designed in advance, or store the bit stream data in a specific storage space for reading when the chip is started, so as to realize the programming configuration of each logic unit and wiring switch of the FPGA. After the program is downloaded, the FPGA chip has the function of user circuit description.
2、 Industry application
1. industry application
FPGA has important advantages such as parallel processing, programmable and accurate timing control. It is widely used in military aerospace, industrial control, automobile, security, display panel, radio and television, medical treatment, testing and measurement, consumer electronics and other fields. It is the core and key device of digital system.
2. characteristics of FPGA chip
Flexible design: it is a hardware reconfigurable chip structure with a rich number of input and output unit pins and triggers.
Strong compatibility: FPGA chip can be compatible with CMOS, TTL and other large-scale integrated circuits to complete computing tasks.
Parallel computing: the internal structure of FPGA can build a corresponding number of pipelines according to the steps of data packets. Different pipelines process different data packets to realize pipeline parallel and data parallel functions.
Strong applicability: it is one of the devices with the shortest development cycle and the lowest application risk in the special circuit (some customers can obtain applicable FPGA chips without investment in research and development).
Status improvement: in some early application scenarios, it was a batch substitute for ASIC chips; Recently, with the expansion of data centers of leading Internet enterprises such as Microsoft, the application scope of FPGA chips has expanded.
3、 Market space
1. global market
FPGA chip has the advantages of high flexibility, low application development cost and short time to market, making its application scenarios cover a wide range of downstream markets, including industrial control, network communication, consumer electronics, data center, automotive electronics, artificial intelligence and so on. In the future, with the deployment of a new generation of global communication equipment and the growing demand in emerging markets such as artificial intelligence and autonomous driving technology, the FPGA market scale is expected to continue to increase.
Significant demand in the Asia Pacific market: the Asia Pacific market is the main application market of FPGA, accounting for more than 40% of the global market share.
By the end of 2018, the scale of China's FPGA market was close to 14billion yuan, and with the spread of 5g communication infrastructure, it was faced with large incremental demand space.
In 2018, the three scenarios of communication, consumer electronics and automobile constituted more than 80% of the total demand for FPGA chips in the world, and the market scale continued to expand.
As te core device of 5g base station, automobile terminal equipment and edge computing equipment, FPGA device has remarkable acceleration effect and faces the deterministic incremental demand of downstream market.
With the improvement of local enterprises in the midstream, domestic FPGA chip products may enter the downstream market with the advantage of low price in the long term, so as to reduce the cost of purchasing high-end programmable devices by downstream enterprises.
2. Chinese market
In recent years, China's FPGA market has continued to expand and grow. According to frost&sullivan data, China's FPGA market has increased from about 6.55 billion yuan in 2016 to about 15.03 billion yuan in 2020, with an average annual compound growth rate of about 23.1%. With the further acceleration of the domestic substitution process, China's FPGA market demand is expected to continue to expand. According to frost&sullivan data, it is estimated that by 2025, China's FPGA market will reach about 33.22 billion yuan.
Split by logic unit, at present, FPGA chips with logic units below 100k are still the largest part in the market, followed by 100k-500k logic units.
Split by process, FPGA chips in the 28nm-90nm process range still occupy the main market position due to their high cost performance and high yield. In addition, due to the lower power consumption, area and higher performance of advanced process products, FPGA chips with processes below 28nm are expected to develop rapidly.
FPGA manufacturers focus on the communication market and consumer electronics scenarios
China's FPGA application market is dominated by consumer electronics and communications. Domestic chips lag behind foreign high-end products in terms of hardware performance, and are not competitive in the high-end civil market, but they have a high short-term shipment in LED display, industrial vision and other fields. With the technological breakthrough of Chinese enterprises and the maturity of 5g technology, Chinese FPGA manufacturers may achieve high growth in the market share in the communication field.
Automotive and data center applications followed
After 2025, edge computing technology and cloud computing technology will be fully rolled out in intelligent transportation network and Supercomputing Center. The growth rate of FPGA application market in automatic driving and data center will exceed that in communication and consumer electronics markets.
4、 Industry structure
Xilinx, the world's largest FPGA manufacturer (56%), has the highest market share and continues to expand, followed by Intel Altera (31%), lattice (3%) and megasomi (3%) achronix (1%).