The Amp Hour

Efinix FPGAs with Sammy Cheung

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Welcome Sammy Cheung, CEO of Efinix!

  • Efinix makes FPGAs in a fabless model.
  • They started in 2012, but really got started with their first product in 2017
  • Co-founder is Tony Ngai (CTO), both he and Sammy used to work at Altera
  • At first they were trying to make a higher growth company, to possibly get aquired quickly. In 2015, when Intel acquired Altera, there was a pause to all acquisition talks.
  • Interestingly, Xilinx is an investor, as well as Samsung
  • Building the first chip (the Trion) required Architecture, Software, IC design. All things have to work together.
  • Licensing IP
  • They ended up selling 1M units
  • Does first chip have to be niche?
  • ASSP
  • Trion is big in Computer Vision (CV) and sensing. It has hardware interfaces for Cameras / MIPI interface
  • Chip architecture also matters
  • Many CV users wanted to put inferencing functions on board, especially because it's fast and flexible.
  • In traditional FPGAs, the routing switch is separate from the logic element. In the Efinix "Fine grain architecture", it's more closely coupled. See the image in this IEEE Spectrum article.
  • Logic elements are more "equivalent" logic elements
  • Trion on 40 nm Low Power (LP) process
  • The soon-to-be released Titanium is different. It has an upgraded architecture (though it's still XLR).
  • Early users have seen a 4x improvement
  • Sammy says these chips are meant as much more than a Bridge device (like a CPLD)
  • Not doing a ton of IP internally, OK with pulling in other companies' IP
  • Other vendors are integrating Efinix FPGA silicon into SIPs, using Chiplet form factors.
  • Simplified power bringup
  • Because doing specific FPGAs to integrate with others
  • Applications
    • Reconfigurable accelerator
    • Security
    • Auto
    • 4 mask sets for Trion, 3 for Titanium
    • Titanium is on a 16 nm process node.
    • These chips are not meant for server farms, but they're also not chasing the low end.
    • Features in the Titanium
      • DSP is more complex than just a MAC block
      • Targeting DSP blocks
      • Soft IP offerings
      • RISC V
      • Next 5 years they expect more processor offerings
      • Can run processor at 400-500 MHz
      • "Domain Specific SOC"
      • The Efinix RISCV offering is based off of the Vex RISC-V design, which won the 2018 Softcore contest, designed by Charles Papon
      • Efinix hopes these chips will enable AI engineers
      • Will Efinix use the open toolchain discussed on The Amp Hour regularly? No plans currently. Sammy contends that super competitve devices require vertical integration.
      • Efinix has a tool called the Interface Designer
      • Separate core from peripherals
      • Sammy is excited about interesting future applications like automotive vision. The car is a "moving supercomputer"
      • Q2 events showing Titanium and Dev kits are on the way. There will be parts out in the Summer, including the first released the TI60 out in Q3.
      • What are their challenges looking forward? Not money or tech, but how the company will change as they grow
        • ...more
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        The Amp HourBy The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)
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