'All Programmable' Xilinx Defines Future Strategy and Goals

Xilinx has announced a new corporate strategic direction and future goals, declaring itself as an “all programmable” company.

Steve Glaser, senior vice president of corporate strategic marketing at Xilinx, said that the vision of “All Programmable,” which Xilinx has been pursuing intensively for the past five years, has reached an important milestone in 2015. He said that Xilinx has now completely shed its old shell as an “FPGA company” and is armed with the armor of “All Programmable.”

First, we spoke to Steve Glaser, senior vice president of Xilinx's Corporate Strategy and Marketing Group, about Xilinx's corporate strategy and asked him a few questions about its expected cost and security feature roadmap.

e4ds: You said that even if Xilinx's market size grows fivefold in the future, the actual market revenue will only double. How much do you expect the cost to increase? For example, if the market grows fivefold, how much do you expect the cost of support, AS, research, etc. to increase to respond to that market growth?

Steve Glaser: Fortunately, the programmability model that we have has tremendous advantages. As we increase our investment in software-defined programmability, we expect the potential user base to increase fivefold because we can develop products that can be used by a large number of different people, but the cost per user will actually decrease in terms of silicon investment. The return on investment (RoI) of our silicon technology can actually increase with a relatively small investment in the software environment because more users can use it. This is a very positive direction for both Xilinx and our users from a programmability perspective.

e4ds: Is it possible to do this with the current resources, or even by increasing them slightly?

Steve Glaser: I can't give you a specific cost, but it's part of our strategy to build a new generation of software development environments, and that's what we've done with the three new products we've introduced last year. Another thing I'll tell you is that we're leveraging the massive open source ecosystem that's out there. There are a lot of people out there building libraries and building blocks for these software-defined systems that are based on open standards. So we're trying to make all that richness of the open source community and open source resources available to our customers. That's where we can deliver a lot more than we expected. The open source communities are building all kinds of middleware for all kinds of applications, and we can tap into all of that.

e4ds: I guess you could call it smart cost.

Steve Glaser: Yeah, we have really great plans for the next phase to accomplish that.

e4ds: Next, I'd like to ask you a question about the slightly distant future. I think that in today's world, it's becoming increasingly important to have a development environment where you can participate in development without having to know everything, because no one person can understand everything. Currently, Xilinx is providing a development environment where software engineers can participate in the programming of FPGAs. Is there a roadmap for developing tools that will allow other support departments, such as marketing, to participate more actively in this software development environment, rather than just software engineers?

Steve Glaser: The marketing and technical requirements that you're talking about are going to have to be serviced by other companies that are focused on that area. There's IBM's Rational DOORS, and there are other vendors that provide requirements planning and traceability tools. We don't plan to get into that kind of product development, but we're going to work with those companies to provide everything that customers need to use those tools. We're going to provide everything that customers need to do to make sure that our development environments are compatible with those requirements management tools, including software-defined development environments.

e4ds: So you're saying it all depends on the customers?

Steve Glaser: Exactly. Our scope is hardware and software tools. Of course, we're investing in integration. Beyond IP integration, we're going to be looking at more productive system-level integration tools that bridge the gap between software and hardware domains and help us integrate all kinds of software and hardware IP more effectively. That's part of our clear roadmap. However, requirements management tools for marketing staff, for example, are not included here.


e4ds: Okay, I see. As security issues become more and more complex, it seems like they are out of the scope of many software engineers. You mentioned implementing security features at the physical level. In the future, will it be possible for software engineers with no knowledge of security technology to implement most of the physical security features using your tools?

Steve Glaser: That's the problem we're going to have to solve going forward. Our Zinq MPSoC has a lot of security features, both software and hardware, and the security is built into the processor, which handles the security subsystem and management functions of the new Zinq family. So we have to make it as easy as possible for our customers to use. Our goal going forward is to embed some of that functionality into the basic hardware platform, so that software engineers can use the new software environment. They have to be able to program the core functions using the SDx environment, and build in the security features for the platform development. So we have to think about hardware development, platform development, and platform programming.

e4ds: Yes, I understand. Thank you.