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20 years ago the chip industry was facing an unprecedented setback - for the first time in its history a shrink was not delivering improvements in

The Putative Promise Of Programmables For many years the programmable companies argued that it was inevitable that they would take over the ASIC and ASSP market. In 2004, John Daane, then CEO of Altera, impressed that rationale on me: “It costs $30m at 90nm for a new chip,” argued Daane, “to get payback you need revenues of $150m. That means, if you’re getting ten per cent market share, that you need a market of $1.5bn. There are not many applications except cell phones and computers which can provide that. The challenge is how to develop products usable across multiple markets.”