Under the 'cold winter' of the semiconductor industry, the recent market unexpected price increases...
The fourth quarter of 2022 should be the 'peak season' of consumer electronics, but under the impact of the epidemic, high inflation and other factors, the demand for consumer electronics market continues to be weak, oversupply, and the 'peak season is difficult to flourish' trend is obvious. Affected by this, the semiconductor industry has entered the 'winter'.
However, unexpectedly, under the 'winter', the semiconductor market recently came rumors of price increases.
AMD, Intel FPGA product price increase?
Recently, foreign media reported that AMD has sent a price hike letter to customers, starting from January 8, 2023, AMD will increase the price of Xilinx FPGA products. Among them, the Spartan 6 series will increase by 25%, the Versal series will not increase, and the remaining other products will increase by 8%.
Earlier this year, AMD completed the acquisition of Xilinx in an all-stock transaction.
AMD said that in the past two years, the company has experienced a period of turbulence caused by force majeure and other factors, and the supply chain has faced many challenges. Due to rising costs and increased investment in the supply chain, the decision was made to increase the price of Xilinx FPGA chips.
According to the 'Science and Technology Board Daily' news, a Xilinx distributor confirmed the price rumors, which said that Xilinx FPGA products will be increased by 8%.
In addition to AMD, the news of Intel's FPGA price increase was reported in July this year. An Intel PSG business line product letter to customers shows that due to supply chain cost pressure and continued strong demand, Intel intends to increase the price of some FPGA products, involving Arria, MAX, Stratix, Cyclone and other product lines, 10% higher than the new product, 20% higher than the old product.
FPGA chip against the market development?
Data show that the FPGA chip (field programmable logic array chip) belongs to the logic chip, the logic chip can be divided into four categories of chips according to function: Universal processor chip (including central processing chip CPU, graphics processing chip GPU, digital signal processing chip DSP, etc.), Memory chip (Memory), application-specific integrated circuit chip (ASIC) and FPGA chip.
Compared with the other three types of integrated circuits, the biggest feature of FPGA chips is field programmability. After the manufacturing is completed, its function is not fixed, the user can according to their actual needs, the circuit designed by themselves through the FPGA chip company provided by the dedicated EDA software to the FPGA chip function configuration, so as to convert the blank FPGA chip into an integrated circuit chip with specific functions. In addition, FPGA chips also have advantages such as low application development costs and short time to market.
Due to the above characteristics, FPGA chip applications are very wide, including industrial control, network communication, consumer electronics, data center, automotive electronics, artificial intelligence and other fields.
In recent years, thanks to the rise of 5G, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies, the demand for data centers and automotive electronics semiconductors has surged, becoming an important application market for FPGA chips, and there is a broad space for future development.