- Achronix aggressively hiring to fill sales, engineering and technical support roles to support the high demand for Achronix products
- Achronix investing in new FPGA-based data accelerators to drive future growth
Santa Clara, Calif., June 14th, 2017 – Achronix announced today that its revenues will grow over 700% year over year and will exceed $100M in 2017. Achronix’s exceptional growth is driven primarily by sales of its Speedster®22i FPGA family and licensing of its Speedcore™ embedded FPGA (eFPGA) IP products. Achronix revenues began to significantly ramp in 2016 and the company reached profitability in Q1 2017. As a result of its strong revenue growth and new design activity, Achronix plans to expand its headcount in three key locations:
- Santa Clara, USA: worldwide headquarters
- Bangalore, India: hardware and software development
- Shanghai and Beijing, China: sales and technical support
The additional headcount will enable Achronix to accelerate its investment in innovative technologies that will further differentiate its products and continue to drive growth. Achronix plans to increase its total headcount by 35% by the end of 2017.
“2017 is a breakout growth year, which establishes Achronix as one of the fastest growing semiconductor companies in the world. We are experiencing strong customer demand for both our Speedster FPGAs as well as our newer Speedcore embedded FPGA in hardware accelerator applications. We are looking for new talent to complement a very strong core team to continue delivering highly innovative silicon and software products,” said Robert Blake, President and CEO, Achronix Semiconductor. “Looking forward, we are entering a new high-growth era where our customized core FPGA technology can accelerate a broad range of complex compute tasks in machine learning, artificial intelligence, software defined networks and 5G base stations.”
The fastest growth segment in the semiconductor industry is hardware accelerator devices that offload CPU data processing and super charge system performance. This segment is expected to grow over 60% per year through 2020, driven primarily by programmable solutions to implement algorithm changes needed to optimize performance for years to come. Of the various programmable architectural options, FPGAs with their ability to create massively parallel structures are the lowest power and the highest performance solutions available.
All of Achronix product lines are built for hardware acceleration applications:
- Speedster standalone FPGAs: The Speedster22i FPGA family is a high-performance and high-density family built on 22nm FinFET technology that offers device densities up to 1 million effective look-up-tables (LUTs) and embedded hard IP for communications applications. Speedster22i devices began shipping in 2013 and moved into production in 2015. Achronix’s next-generation Speedster family will be available in 2018 and be a blend of FPGA and hard accelerator structures that offer the highest performance and lowest power solutions for CPU offload for data center and enterprise applications.
- Speedcore eFPGAs: Based on the same proven high-performance, high-density architecture as Speedster FPGAs, Speedcore IP is in production on TSMC 16FF+. Achronix began shipping Speedcore eFPGA IP to customers in 2016 and is ramping significantly in 2017 based on demand in data center HPC applications, wireless infrastructure, networking infrastructure and automotive ADAS and AD systems. Achronix is developing its next-generation Speedcore architecture that will be available on TSMC’s 7nm process technology for design starts in 2H 2017.
- Speedchip™ FPGA-based accelerator chiplets: Achronix is currently working with several companies to define and build custom FPGA-based chiplets for 2.5D package integration. Companies interested in Speedchip chiplets are asked to contact Achronix for more details.
- ACE design tools: All of Achronix FPGA products are supported by Achronix’s best-in-class design tools called ACE. Achronix will continue to add features and enhance functionality to support FPGA-based acceleration applications.
Achronix Products Target Applications in Accelerator Markets
The enormous data and computational requirements from Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems such as machine learning, deep learning, computer and embedded vision, along with 5G wireless infrastructure are driving the market for hardware accelerator devices that offload CPU data processing and super charge system performance. FPGAs, with their ability to create massively parallel structures as hardware accelerator devices, can be reprogrammed to support changing algorithms and are the lowest power and highest performance programmable hardware accelerators available. Speedcore eFPGA delivers further performance acceleration with 10× lower latency and 10× higher bandwidth compared to standalone FPGAs. Speedcore IP is currently being used or evaluated for high-performance acceleration systems including data center acceleration, automotive ADAS, database acceleration, and 5G wireless infrastructure.
About Speedcore Embedded FPGA (eFPGA)
Speedcore IP is embedded FPGA (eFPGA) that can be integrated into an ASIC or SoC. Customers specify their logic, RAM and DSP resource needs, then Achronix configures the Speedcore IP to meet their individual requirements. Speedcore LUTs, RAM blocks and DSP64 blocks can be assembled like Lego blocks to create the optimal programmable function for any given application.