Another PLD start up – Can Tabula Succeed Where Others Have Failed?

What Happened?

 

After nearly seven years in stealth mode, yesterday Tabula announced its first product offering, Spacetime, a programmable logic architecture that uses time as a third dimension for configurability.

 

VDC’s Views

 

The PLD, or more specifically, the FPGA market has evolved into something most closely resembling a duopoly where two companies, Xilinx (NASDAQ: XLNX) and Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR), have dominated market revenue and unit shipments.

 

So what appears to be so different with Tabula, who is entering a market where so many other companies have failed (Ambric, MathStar, and Velogix to name only a few)?  The company claims that it has to do with a fundamental difference in their approach to the PLD’s architecture and functionality. 

 

Supposedly, the rapid rate of reconfiguration in their technology allows portions of a function to be executed by different “folds” within the processor across time, so that the results for each part of the function can be locally stored and used to rapidly and efficiently execute the next portion of the function.

 

Although Tabula claims that their compiler can automatically map standard RTL to their new device thereby reducing some of the potential impact on the engineering process, the ultimate adoption of this technology will likely be limited be the same factors that have affected many new start-ups in this arena:

 

• Potential impact on project workflow versus established processes
• Issues pertaining to integration with current tools
• Implications regarding any legacy code bases (including those for hardware, software, and algorithm engineering) and the investment they represent
• Lack of partner evangelism or strong ecosystem
• Potential effect on project schedules and time to market
• Risk inherent to engineering organization when changing any processing platform or component, especially in an unstable economy when start ups (or any other company) can fail.

 

While there is certainly an opportunity for new PLD technology to enter the market and steal share from the incumbents and/or from ASIC shipments, Tabula and any other start up will need to obtain significant buy-in from leading software and system tool vendors and embedded OS suppliers in order to build up the sufficient ground swell and robust ecosystem needed to drive substantial adoption over the long term.