by Kevin Morris For leading FPGA suppliers Xilinx and Intel (Altera), the secret to success has always been to beat the other. That’s how duopolies work. For everyone else wanting to wedge their way into the highly-competitive programmable logic market, common wisdom has always been to find a niche. The niche strategy is more of a survival trick. Numerous companies have made a decent living by zooming in on just one aspect of the FPGA market – military/aerospace applications, ultra-low power applications, small form factor, and so on. Companies chose their niche, focused their R&D and marketing efforts at wooing those customers, and steered well clear of the mainstream high-end FPGA market that forms the bread and butter of the two big suppliers.