Renesas is going to release cheap and economical FPGAs

The Japanese chip company Renesas is entering the market for field-programmable gate array chips, competing with AMD’s Xilinx and Intel’s Altera, among others. Renesas releases economical and cheaper fpgas with the ForgeFPGA series.

ForgeFPGA chips consume up to 20 microamps on standby and cost less than $0.50 each when purchased in bulk. Renesas provides free development software for the programmable chips. The software offers a macrocell mode with a schematic development flow and an hdl mode for programming in a traditional Verilog environment. Renesas has not yet announced more details about the upcoming chips.

Renesas was able to use the development team of Silego, a subsidiary of Dialog Semiconductor, to design the chips. That American company was taken over by Renesas at the beginning of this year. Silego releases, among other things, the programmable GreenPAK cmics, where cmic stands for configurable mixed-signal integrated circuits. Fitbit, Garmin and GoPro, among others, use Silego’s smics.

Renesas will make the first ForgeFPGA chips available in the second quarter of 2022, but partner companies can already request engineering samples. FPGAs have programmable logic so that manufacturers can implement different functions on initially identical chips. The resulting chips can then perform those tasks quickly and efficiently.

In data centers, for example, large tech companies are increasingly using FPGAs for specific calculations, which was the reason for AMD last year to take over Xilinx and Intel, already in 2015, to take over Altera. Renesas is competing with these two market leaders.