Industry Expert Blogs

Nearly a decade ago Xilinx and Altera set a new direction for the FPGA industry, each announcing a high-end FPGA sitting beside a powerful CPUs on one die. Enticed by what had been explosive growth in a networking industry that was in fact using MPUs and high-end FPGAs side by side on their boards, the programmable-logic leaders poured development and marketing dollars into their new flagship ICs, Altera Excalibur and Xilinx Virtex-II Pro.

If this story doesn't sound familiar, it's because the two chips were both doomed to vanish. Within about a year both chips were no longer actively marketed, though you could still buy them. Quiet settled over the scene of the revolution, dust gathered on the engineering notebooks, and both companies silently pledged not to try that again.

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