Announcement of ArcticPro Ultra-Low Power Embedded FPGA IP Licensing Initiative

QuickLogic Corporation has announced a strategic initiative to continuously expand its market share. Through a new initiative called ArcticPro™ eFPGA, QuickLogic plans to selectively provide licensing rights to its proprietary ultra-low power programmable logic technology.

The new embedded FPGA initiative was launched alongside a partnership agreement recently announced jointly by GLOBALFOUNDRIES and QuickLogic. Through this partnership, SoC design companies can now obtain licenses from QuickLogic when they wish to embed ArcticPro ultra-low power eFPGA technology into designs targeting GLOBALFOUNDRIES' new power and cost-optimized 22nm FDSOI fab technology.




GLOBALFOUNDRIES' 22nm FDSOI fab technology is scheduled for production in 2017. ArcticPro IP can also be utilized for designs targeting GLOBALFOUNDRIES' currently widely-used 65nm and 40nm fab technologies. QuickLogic expects to be able to announce news of additional foundry partner agreements in the future.

According to market research firm Markets&Markets, the embedded semiconductor intellectual property market is projected to grow from the current 3.09 billion dollars to over 7 billion dollars by 2022. One of the key drivers of this growth is the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) market, which is expected to reach approximately 1.1 billion dollars in scale by 2022. This growth opportunity in the IoT market also presents new challenges for SoC designers.

Unlike the mobile market dominated by smartphones, the IoT market encompasses highly diverse end products and related derivative products that are difficult to address with a single fixed SoC design. In addition to this fact, as the time-to-market costs for SoC devices continue to increase, there is a strengthening trend toward improving design flexibility of SoCs so that IoT end product designs can be more widely adopted. In advanced fab nodes, embedded programmable logic is being used to economically meet these requirements.

To reduce design risk and accelerate development speed when applying ArcticPro eFPGA technology to new SoC designs, QuickLogic plans to announce a new Borealis™ design tool suite in the first quarter of 2017. Using the new tools, SoC designers can easily evaluate and define customized eFPGA logic cell array sizes as well as generate all design files necessary for SoC integration.