Switching focus

The received wisdom in the programmable logic world is that a device should have the potential to be all things to all users. There have been some attempts to drill down into particular markets – such as Xilinx with market dedicated spins on its Virtex family – but US start up Cswitch is taking an even more focused approach. It is concentrating on the communications market and, within that, the increasing and cost driven infrastructural move to packet based networks. “We think the fpga model breaks down if any one of its markets faces an inflection in its requirements – and that inflection is coming in the packet based space,” says Jack Ogawa, the company’s vp of marketing. “After we’d got beyond the comms bubble, things were still fairly quiet. All you needed was a Moore’s Law scaling in terms of either performance or innovation. But with everything going packet based because of the savings the operators can see there, we’ve seen an explosion in bandwidth requirements for next generation networks. The twist now is that Moore’s Law doesn’t get you there; you need architectural innovation. That’s the opportunity that we’re trying to pounce on.”