The recent semiconductor chip shortage has got several industries in shambles. Companies are facing delays to deliver their products according to their timeline. However, several companies are trying to find alternative solutions to this shortage. Efinix is one such company with the value proposition of the technology that will continue to be more and more compelling over time. Efinix is an FPGA company dedicated to providing low power, high performance, reconfigurable FPGA platforms to the mainstream market.
At the helm of Efinix is Sammy Cheung who is driven to combine disruptive technologies with innovative ideas. He is the Co-founder, President and CEO focused on developing Efinix’s disruptive Quantum compute technology to become the leading company in a new era of low power embedded AI and data computing.
The Overview of Efinix
Efinix is an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) company dedicated to providing low power, high performance, reconfigurable FPGA platforms to the mainstream market. At the heart of Efinix FPGAs is a revolutionary Quantum Compute Fabric. This efficient fabric delivers breakthrough advantages in power consumption, performance, and area over conventional FPGA technologies. The result is a family of FPGA devices that are small enough for the most space-constrained applications, low enough power to operate in power-constrained edge applications and priced for volume deployment.
For the first time, the industry has access to a truly reconfigurable device delivering zero risk, zero NRE and fast time to innovation for mainstream high volume applications. With device densities from 4K logic elements up to 1M logic elements, Efinix has a device to meet the specifics of your market, whether it be edge compute, IoT and AI or industrial automation.
Delivering Tech Advantage for Revolutionizing System Design Experience
As compute requirements of modern systems continue to increase, designers are forced to adopt smaller and smaller silicon process geometries. These come at an ever-increasing cost, increased complexity, risk, and time to market. These trends diverge from the requirement of lower-cost solutions delivered to ever-shrinking market windows with volatile feature requirements.
Efinix technology is truly disruptive in that designers can now innovate in real-time without the years’ long delays of custom silicon design and fabrication. Its programs have zero risk since they are essentially software-defined, and once a feature set is defined, the solution is instantly ready for mass volume deployment, that will change the way systems are conceived, developed, and deployed. Efinix is delivering a technology advantage that will revolutionize the system design experience.
Efinix devices incorporate soft RISC-V processors that allow hardware/software system partitioning in real-time. System functionality can be rapidly expressed in software and then progressively accelerated in custom hardware accelerators on the same silicon to deliver hardware speed with the convenience and time to market software.
A free accelerator framework ensures that the majority of a hardware/software partitioned design is readily available to the designer requiring a minimum of accelerator design to achieve unprecedented hardware performance. The result is low program risk and rapid time to market.
Delivering Unprecedented Computing Capability
Sammy states that the latest product family from Efinix is Titanium. Fabricated in 16nm technology, Titanium delivers unprecedented compute capability with ultra-low power consumption. The exchangeable logic and routing (XLR) cell at the heart of the Quantum Compute Fabric ensures that designs are efficiently placed within the fabric eliminating bottlenecks of compute or routing resources that plague conventional FPGAs. The result is efficient designs with high utilization ratios and high maximum clock frequencies.
The system performance is augmented with Titanium’s custom-designed digital signal processing blocks specially designed to accelerate AI algorithms. The efficiency of the Titanium architecture coupled with the small 16nm process geometry ensures that titanium devices have an extremely small footprint. The Ti60 has 60,000 logic elements that can be packaged in a wafer level chip scale package measuring just 3.5mm x 3.4mm. Soft RISC-V processors augment the embedded DSPs providing traditional software-based control plane capability with dynamic software/hardware partitioning in the FPGA fabric.
Offering Unmatched Servcies
Efinix FPGAs are the first to exhibit the compute and logic density for today’s complex systems in a small, low power footprint and priced for mass deployment. For the first time, customers can develop applications in the lab on Efinix devices and deploy them in cost-effective mass-produced solutions without redesigning them into low-cost design alternatives. The low power of Efinix devices means that they can be deployed at the edge without regard for thermal control. Low power yet high compute density means that end systems containing Efinix devices consume less power, are less expensive to run and have longer product life cycles without compromising system features and performance.
While other FPGA suppliers have either tailored their offering towards the data center with the correspondingly high cost and power consumption or lack the compute density to absorb entire edge compute applications. Efinix products provide the perfect mix of computing capability in a cost-effective, low power footprint.
Empowering Diverse Work-Culture
Efinix is passionate about success through empowerment and accountability. It believes that trust and respect for the individual should be a fundamental belief and a cornerstone of its productivity and success. Sammy believes that innovation and success come from inclusion and diversity, and it strives to make those key aspects of its everyday activities.
In Efinix’s interactions outside of the company, it strives to create a culture of service-oriented customer focus and hold itself accountable to uncompromising integrity in everything it does.
Continuing to be More and More Compelling
Sammy states that in the larger scheme of things, the pandemic has been a short yet extremely unfortunate blip. The semiconductor markets will overcome the short-term supply shortages that the industry is experiencing, and the trends to smaller silicon process geometries and more complex systems will resume. Efinix continues to position itself for the inevitable realization that a custom product build from a cost-effective, reprogrammable, standard product is the only solution that makes sense for 90 percent of the world’s applications.
Evolving Ground-breaking Technology
Efinix will continue to evolve its ground-breaking technology beyond the current Titanium line. It will continue to innovate in its RISC-V and Quantum Acceleration initiatives driving ease of use for designers eager to embrace the Efinix value proposition. It will see a migration from expensive and high-risk custom silicon programs to low-cost, fast-to-market solutions based around Efinix reconfigurable standard products.
“As the world embraces AI technology and needs a high compute performance, adaptable solution for cost-effective edge deployment, we anticipate that Efinix will be at the forefront,” concludes Sammy.
Sammy Cheung, Co-Founder, President and CEO, Efinix
