With the advancements in communications and networking, the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) market has gained significant popularity. Along with this, today, it is more popular than ever before owing to the rapid evolution in the electronic industry.
The frequent changes across various sectors put FPGAs to use for designing specialized integrated circuits, configured by using hardware description languages (HDL) such as VHSIC hardware description language (VHDL) and Verilog. Furthermore, they solve various purposes such as in the financial sector which includes real-time trading, risk analysis, and many others.
In recent years, a wide range of automotive, military, consumer and defense applications have been using FPGAs. In addition, the implication of FPMG has been bolstered by the increased and progressive inclination of sectors toward artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. In this blog, we will discuss how the FPGA market is bolstering across the globe and what the recent developments in the market are.
Increased Penetration of IoT to Increase the Demand
Over the years, with research, development and simultaneous advancements, FPGAs have proven to be more power-efficient for IoT. According to the State of the IoT 2020 report, the number of IoT connection devices surpassed the number of non-IoT connection devices for the first time. Out of the 21.7 billion active connected devices worldwide, 11.7 billion (or 54%) were IoT device connections at the end of 2020. By 2025, this number is expected to exceed 30 billion—nearly four IoT devices per person on average.
With IoT comes the promise of ample innovation to facilitate business models and improve the global industry in multiple ways. The chip requirement has increased for IoT devices and is projected to be on a rise throughout 2032 owing to the rapid increase in the number of IoT devices and the proliferation of electronic content in automobiles. To cater to this, the manufacturers are prioritizing balanced energy consumption along with the miniaturization of chips.
In addition, the demand for IoT is increasing with each passing year, signifying the growth in demand for semiconductors and other components. As per the analysts at Future Market Insights, the global semiconductor chipset market has been performing extremely well, projected to surpass U.S. $26.3 billion by the end of 2032. Market vendors are increasingly focusing on developing FPGAs to integrate them into IoT devices and solutions.
For instance, Intel launched its first AI-optimized FPGA—the Stratix 10 NX—which features expanded AI Tensor blocks (30 multipliers and 30 accumulators), integrated HBM memory and high-bandwidth networking. The new chip continues leveraging Intel’s chipset architecture, and the FPGA portion of the chip is fabbed using the company’s 14nm technology.
Intel reports the new FPGA will deliver up to 15× more INT8 compute than the Stratix 10 MX. The new chip also features “up to 57.8 Gig PAM4 transceivers and hard Intel Ethernet blocks for high efficiency.”
In addition to this, in February 2022, QuickLogic Corporation announced that its PolarPro 3 family of low-power, SRAM-based FPGAs were available to solve semiconductor supply availability challenges. This highly flexible family features power consumption as low as 55 uA and a tiny footprint in small packages, as well as die options.
Global Infrastructure as a Service Market to Add Traction
With the acceleration of technological deployment in the digital realm across the FPGAs market, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to cloud customers has also increased. The use of devices and applications employing cloud computing, big data analysis, blockchains or artificial intelligence has also come into existence. Furthermore, IaaS in FPGAs make tasks like network encryption, deep learning, memory caching, webpage ranking, high-frequency trading and video conversion easier.
Last November, Microsoft Ignite announced the memory-optimized Ev5 Azure Virtual Machine (VM) series based on the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Platinum 8370C processor. The Ev5 VMs are designed for memory-intensive business-critical applications, relational database servers, and in-memory data analytics workloads.
The new addition to the Ev5 Azure VM family, the Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VMs offer up to 120,000 IOPS and 4,000 MBps of remote disk storage throughout. They also include up to 512 GiB of RAM and local SSD storage (maximum 2,400 GiB). This new VM series provides up to three times an increase in remote storage performance compared to previous VM generations, and helps consolidate existing workloads on fewer VMs or smaller VM sizes to achieve potential cost savings.
How is Asia Pacific Region Taking a Lead in the Market?
The Asia Pacific, especially China, holds the largest share in the semiconductor market owing to the increased deployment of FPGA along with persistent investments and initiatives being undertaken by the government. Reports suggest that China consumes nearly half of all semiconductors annually, both for internal use and potential export. This resulted in the rapid expansion of demand for FPGA in China.
To complement this China’s State Council 2014 “National Integrated Circuit Industry Development Guidelines” set the goal of becoming a global leader in all segments of the semiconductor industry by 2030. In addition, the Made in China 2025 initiative maintains achieving the know-how with regards to advanced semiconductor manufacturing as a vital component of China’s future economy and society. Lastly, in the midst of shifting supply chains and macroeconomic policy, the Chinese government is spending aggressively on semiconductor investment, acquisition and talent recruitment to uplift the industry by on-shoring chip manufacturing equal to those of the world’s top foundries.
Not just this, the China FPGA market is expanding as the country leads the position in the global manufacturing of consumer electronics gadgets such as smart homes. The popularity of AI Internet of Things (IoT) is likely to be a significant development potential for manufacturers of FPGAs.
Conclusion
Over the years, FPGAs have evolved over five generations. At present, the evolution in the market is due to the increasing demand for programmable FPGA across different sectors including aerospace and defense; high-performance computing and data storage; video and image processing; and wired and wireless communications. Looking forward, FPGAs will gain prominence in deep neural networks (DNNs) that are used for AI, taking over the major technological advancements of the world.
