Moore's law is slowing down because it is increasingly difficult to move from one process node to the next. Compounding this trend, each process node is yielding fewer gains in transistor density and performance. With decreasing geometry size, it is becoming much more expensive and difficult to design and deliver fully functional ASICs due to more complex design rules, increased complexity of integrating complex IP and long verification cycles. Further, mask costs are rising exponentially. The result of all these factors is that the time and cost to develop a custom ASIC is prohibitive for most companies. Alternatively, the trend is towards the use of standard products where possible or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) when custom functionality is required.

The Internet of Things, cloud communications, mobile devices and ubiquitous communications has led to an explosion in the volume of data created, stored and analyzed. Communications infrastructure has historically relied mostly on CPUs to direct and process the data, but CPUs are increasingly unable to keep up with network speeds especially when combined with encryption and data analytics requirements. The architecture for data centers and enterprise networks will be adapted with customized hardware that offers orders of magnitude improvement in performance, power and cost efficiency. This new architecture will require flexibility to support new communication and encryption standards. I believe that FPGAs will be the mechanism that delivers the customized hardware and flexibility required for this new architecture paradigm.
The increasing cost of ASIC development is pushing more communication infrastructure companies to consider FPGAs. FPGAs offer high capacity and feature-packed devices that have zero mask costs and offer significantly faster time-to-market. FPGAs are also starting to be used in environments historically reserved only for CPUs, such as the datacenter. For example Microsoft has a highly-publicized effort using FPGAs to significantly accelerate their datacenter operations. State of the art FPGAs such as the Achronix Speedster22iHD1000 also include hardened IP such as 100G Ethernet controllers. This enables the FPGA to connect directly to a high-bandwidth connection and process data in an extremely efficient way.

Competing in a Hypercompetitive World
With increased competition, companies are plotting strategies to strengthen their competitive advantage. On the marketing side, businesses need to identify the needs of their customers and determine what unique competition differentiation they can deliver in the areas of improved capabilities, faster time-to-market and lower costs. In this fast paced, highly competitive world, what's imperative is to deliver new products faster by adopting novel technologies.
Companies are looking for ways that they can increase flexibility to deliver product enhancements while also trying to reduce their development times. These realities can no longer be reconciled with building custom hardware solutions using ASICs. FPGAs allow companies to build programmable hardware that can be enhanced over time. This allows them to deliver differentiating capabilities to their current and new customers on an ongoing basis. Most importantly, programmable hardware solutions offer lower total cost of ownership because the enhancements are programmed into the hardware instead of the historical method of building new hardware.

Ensure Close Customer Relations
At Achronix, we believe that quality determines the ability to succeed in a competitive market and has a direct impact on customers. For example, in my team every improvement we make, whether it be runtime reduction, improving our FPGA performance, or adding productivity features has a clear and immediate impact on our customers. Ensuring close relationships with customers provides a clear window in what challenges they are facing and allows our limited resources to be focused on those needs rather than theoretical innovations. Seeing the direct impact of our work on customers' success is very satisfying and the biggest motivator for the team to continue pushing the envelope.