Few challenges in the world of high-technology startups are as daunting as that of putting a new FPGA company on the map. Sure, there’s the obvious hurdle of coming up with a better mousetrap – against two extremely innovative and experienced mousetrap makers who most certainly have deeper pockets than you. And deep pockets matter. If you don’t have the resources to deal with the nine-digit-dollar entry fee for new device development at competitive process nodes, you’re better off not leaving the starting line.
Then, there’s the matter of timing the waves. Let’s say you came up with a fancy new FPGA design, and you planned to implement it at 28nm. If you started designing at about the time 28nm technology was first available, and you executed your design project perfectly, you’d at least be on an even playing field with the big established companies. (Not that the even playing field would help that much, given that the other teams have about 50x the number of players you’re fielding.) But chances are, you didn’t execute your design project perfectly, and chances are, the semiconductor fab didn’t give you top priority compared with their long-time high-paying partners. That means you launched your 28nm a year or so later than the big guys.
You’re pretty much dead in the water.
Unless you then re-group, plunk down another couple years of sweat and another nine-digit budget, and try to catch the next wave before it crashes you against the rocks. Sounds pretty fun, doesn’t it?
This lovely scenario doesn’t even cover the REALLY tricky parts – like getting a robust, reliable design tool chain that your customers can use to productively create designs on your new chips, or having sufficient breadth and depth in your applications support team to help those customers complete their designs successfully. It also doesn’t cover what is perhaps the trickiest part of all: getting engineers to trust their project to unproven chips, designed with unproven tools, from an unproven supplier – a supplier who, if history is any guide, has a significant chance of going out of business within the first few years.
That makes trying to start a new FPGA company seem downright crazy.