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Silicon Valley --It seems unlikely that a tiny engineering company could set the $4 billion programmable-logic world on its ear, but that's just what happened last year when little-known Adaptive Silicon Inc. (ASi) landed a big equity investment from LSI Logic Corp.
Earlier this month, ASi received another ringing endorsement-to the tune of $6.3 million in financing-again from LSI Logic, along with EDA vendor Synopsys Inc., Mountain View, Calif. The money will fund escalating marketing and engineering efforts as ASi prepares to make its official debut in March.
ASi's product-the first commercially viable, licensable FPGA core- suddenly made very real the possibility that ASICs could make generic PLDs obsolete. LSI's revelation that it will design the core into its 0.18-micron ASIC library set off a chain reaction among PLD vendors, which are now scrambling to accomplish the antithesis of their nature: embed ASIC cores in programmable devices.
While ASi contends its programmable logic cores (PLCs)...