Achronix Semiconductor Corporation

Type	Private
Industry	Semiconductors
Founded	2004 (2004) in Ithaca, New York, U.S.
Founders	Clinton Kelly John Lofton Holt Virantha Ekanayake Rajit Manohar[1]
Headquarters	Santa Clara, California , United States
Key people	Robert Blake (CEO) Virantha Ekanayake (CTO)
Products	FPGA, eFPGA IP
Revenue	>$100M/year
Number of employees	<200
Website	www.achronix.com

Achronix Semiconductor Corporation is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California with an additional R&D facility in Bangalore, India,^[2][3] and an additional sales office in Shenzhen, China.^[4] Achronix is a diversified fabless semiconductor company that sells FPGA products, embedded FPGA (eFPGA) products, system-level products and supporting design tools. Achronix was founded in 2004 in Ithaca, New York based on technology licensed from Cornell University.^[5] In 2006, Achronix moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley.^[6][7]

Achronix was originally self-funded by several million dollars of founder's capital. Since 2006, Achronix has been funded by a combination of Venture capital funding, private equity funding and debt from traditional lenders.^[8] Since Achronix is a private company, the total amount of capital raised to date has not been disclosed, but the total amount of capital raised is thought to be in the $180M-$200M range. Achronix achieved profitability in 2016 and reportedly achieved sales of over $100M YTD in 2017, making it one of the highest growth semiconductor companies globally.^[9]

In July 2021 Achronix cancelled its plans to go public through a merger with a special acquisition (SPAC) company ACE Convergence Acquisition Corp due to regulatory approval difficulties. The proposed transaction valued the company at $2.1bn.^[10]

Products

• Speedster7t FPGAs - Standalone FPGA devices built on TSMC 7 nm FinFET technology. It includes a 2D Network-on-Chip (NoC), GDDR6 memory interfaces, up to 72 transceivers operating at 1-112Gbit/s, 400G Ethernet MACs, PCIe Gen5 controllers and up to 1,760 machine learning processors (MLP) for mathematical operations with variable precision number formats.^[11]
• Speedcore eFPGAs - Embedded FPGA IP that is integrated into a SoC or ASIC device. It consists of customer defined amounts of reconfigurable logic blocks, logic and block RAM, DSP blocks and Machine Learning Process (MLP) blocks.^[12] Speedcore is supported in TSMC 16FF+, TSMC 7 nm FinFET and TSMC 12FFC is under development.^[13]
• VectorPath Accelerator Cards - PCIe card which is based on the Speedster7t FPGA family. This card includes 400G and 200G network interfaces, 8 GDDR6 memories, and additional expansion ports for custom connectivity.^[14]
• ACE - FPGA development tools which are used to design for all of Achronix's FPGA and eFPGA devices.^[15][16]

Awards and recognition

In August 2018, Achronix was recognized by CIOReview Magazine as one of 20 of the 2018 Most Promising High-Performance Compute Solution Providers.^[17]

References

External links

• Intel lets outside chip maker into its fabs. Achronix goes all red, white, and blue // The Register, 1 November 2010
• Exploring the Intel and Achronix Deal // David Kanter, Real World Tech, November 8, 2010
• 22-nm-Chips von Intel heben Startup auf FPGA-Thron Archived 2020-07-26 at the Wayback Machine // Frank Riemenschneider, Elektronik Net, (in German), 2012-04-24
• Intel’s First Factory Customer Touts Made-in-USA Chips // The Wall Street Journal, Feb 20, 2013
• Breaking the Balance. Achronix FPGAs Disrupt the Status Quo // Kevin Morris, EEJournal, February 26, 2013
• My Take on Achronix & Its Products, Paul Dillien, All programmable planet, 3/11/2013
• Alexander Bachmutsky, System Design for Telecommunication Gateways, chapter "3.5.2.1 Achronix FPGAs"

See also

• Altera
• Xilinx