Survey Shows Hidden Market for ESL and FPGA

ABINGDON, England--Aug. 31, 2005--Celoxica today announced the results of the second annual worldwide design trends survey, conducted by Electronics Weekly and Celoxica. The results, revealed not only a significant planned increase in ESL methodology adoption, but demonstrated that much of the true market for ESL tools is "hidden" from much of the analysis of the market. The survey showed more than 40 percent of the market is outside the realm of hardware and semiconductor design, none of which are regularly polled by traditional analysis.

In this year's survey, open to the design community for two months between mid May and mid July 2005, 723 designers responded to more than 30 questions about current and future design activity.

Headlining the survey 58 percent of designers recorded intent to increase their use of ESL design, with SystemC usage set to increase three-fold in next design projects. In 2006, 20 percent of FPGA designs will exceed five million gates and more than two-thirds of designers will use FPGAs coupled to an embedded processor, off-chip processor or DSP. FPGA based prototyping maintains its critical role in ASIC development, with 69 percent of ASIC designers reporting usage. FPGA designs with clock frequencies above 500Mhz are set to treble in 2006, though this figure is still well down on 500Mhz and greater than 750Mhz ASIC design numbers.

Interestingly, the survey pointed out the growing use of FPGA and ESL by users not traditionally responsible for hardware design. Over 50% of algorithm developers reported using FPGA devices in their end products, and production FPGA usage was also high among systems and software engineers. This same group also reported the highest intent to use ESL tools in their next design projects.

"The survey confirms our experience that ESL design and programmable silicon are pushing the boundaries of EDA growth," said Jeff Jussel, vice president of marketing for Celoxica. "We are seeing adoption of ESL design acceleration across the board. Increasing size, complexity and the use of multiple HW and SW components and SoC in new designs mean that trend will continue."

The survey results also gave rise to issues that the design community and EDA vendors need to tackle. A massive 86 percent of designers reported no training in ESL design languages and nearly a quarter cited education and training as a key issue in encouraging ESL adoption.

Comprehensive survey results and analysis are available at www.celoxica.com/designersurvey

About Celoxica

An innovator in Electronic System Level (ESL) design, Celoxica is turning software into silicon by supplying the design tools, boards, IP and services that enable the next generation of advanced electronic product design. Celoxica technology raises design abstraction to the algorithm level, accelerating productivity and lowering risk and costs by generating semiconductor hardware directly from C-based software descriptions. Adding to a growing installed base, Celoxica provides the world's most widely used C-based behavioral design and synthesis solutions to companies developing semiconductor products in markets such as consumer electronics, defense and aerospace, automotive, industrial and security. For more information, visit: www.celoxica.com.

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Source: Celoxica