Achronix Semiconductor is an American fabless semiconductor company based in
Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara (; Spanish for " Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in the Bay Area. Located in the southern Bay Area, the cit ...
with an additional R&D facility in
Bangalore, India
Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...
, and an additional sales office in
Shenzhen, China. Achronix is a diversified fabless semiconductor company that sells
FPGA products, embedded
FPGA (eFPGA) products, system-level products and supporting design tools. Achronix was founded in 2004 in
Ithaca, New York
Ithaca is a city in the Finger Lakes region of New York, United States. Situated on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake, Ithaca is the seat of Tompkins County and the largest community in the Ithaca metropolitan statistical area. It is named ...
based on technology licensed from
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
. In 2006, Achronix moved its headquarters to
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Coun ...
.
Achronix was originally self-funded by several million dollars of founder's capital. Since 2006, Achronix has been funded by a combination of
Venture capital
Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...
funding, private equity funding and debt from traditional lenders. Since Achronix is a private company, the total amount of capital raised to date has not been disclosed, but the total amount of capital raised is thought to be in the $180M-$200M range. Achronix achieved profitability in 2016 and reportedly achieved sales of over $100M YTD in 2017, making it one of the highest growth semiconductor companies globally.
In July 2021 Achronix cancelled its plans to go public through a merger with a special acquisition (
SPAC) company ACE Convergence Acquisition Corp due to regulatory approval difficulties. The proposed transaction valued the company at $2.1bn.
Products
* '
Speedster7t FPGAs'' - Standalone FPGA devices built on
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semiconductor company, the world' ...
7 nm
FinFET
A fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is a multigate device, a MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) built on a substrate where the gate is placed on two, three, or four sides of the channel or wrapped around the channel, ...
technology. It includes a 2D Network-on-Chip (NoC), GDDR6 memory interfaces, up to 72 transceivers operating at 1-112Gbit/s, 400G Ethernet MACs, PCIe Gen5 controllers and up to 1,760 machine learning processors (MLP) for mathematical operations with variable precision number formats.
* '
Speedcore eFPGAs'' - Embedded FPGA IP that is integrated into a SoC or ASIC device. It consists of customer defined amounts of reconfigurable logic blocks, logic and block RAM, DSP blocks and Machine Learning Process (MLP) blocks. Speedcore is supported in TSMC 16FF+, TSMC 7 nm FinFET and TSMC 12FFC is under development.
* '
VectorPath Accelerator Cards'' - PCIe card which is based on the Speedster7t FPGA family. This card includes 400G and 200G network interfaces, 8 GDDR6 memories, and additional expansion ports for custom connectivity.
* ACE - FPGA development tools which are used to design for all of Achronix's FPGA and eFPGA devices.
Awards and recognition
In August 2018, Achronix was recognized by ''CIOReview Magazine'' as one of 20 of the 2018 Most Promising High-Performance Compute Solution Providers.
References
External links
Intel lets outside chip maker into its fabs. Achronix goes all red, white, and blue// The Register, 1 November 2010
Exploring the Intel and Achronix Deal// David Kanter, Real World Tech, November 8, 2010
22-nm-Chips von Intel heben Startup auf FPGA-Thron// Frank Riemenschneider, Elektronik Net, , 2012-04-24
Intel’s First Factory Customer Touts Made-in-USA Chips// The Wall Street Journal, Feb 20, 2013
Breaking the Balance. Achronix FPGAs Disrupt the Status Quo// Kevin Morris, EEJournal, February 26, 2013
My Take on Achronix & Its Products Paul Dillien, All programmable planet, 3/11/2013
* Alexander Bachmutsky
System Design for Telecommunication Gateways chapter "3.5.2.1 Achronix FPGAs"
See also
*
Altera
Altera Corporation was a manufacturer of programmable logic devices (PLDs) headquartered in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1983 and acquired by Intel in 2015.
The main product lines from Altera were the flagship Stratix series, mid-ran ...
*
Xilinx
Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company was known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and creating the ...
{{Programmable Logic
American companies established in 2004
Electronics companies established in 2004
Fabless semiconductor companies
Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Manufacturing companies based in San Jose, California
Semiconductor companies of the United States
Reconfigurable computing