The fourth quarter of 2022 was supposed to be the "peak season" of consumer electronics, but under the impact of epidemic, high inflation and other factors, the demand of consumer electronics market continued to decline, and the situation of oversupply and "peak season difficult to thrive" was obvious. As a result, the semiconductor industry has entered a "cold winter".
However, to our surprise, under the "cold winter", the semiconductor market recently heard rumors of price increases.
Price increase of AMD and Intel FPGA products?
Recently, foreign media reported that AMD has sent a letter of price increase to customers. From January 8, 2023, AMD will raise the price of Xilinx FPGA products. Among them, the price of Spartan 6 series will increase by 25%, the price of Versal series will not increase, and the price of other products will increase by 8%.
At the beginning of this year, AMD completed the acquisition of Xilinsi through all stock transaction.
AMD said that in the past two years, enterprises have experienced a period of turbulence caused by force majeure and other factors, and the supply chain is facing many challenges. Due to the rising cost and investment in the supply chain, the decision to increase the price of Xilinx FPGA chips was made.
According to the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, a Salings distributor confirmed the rumor of price increase, saying that the price of Salings FPGA products would increase by 8%.
In addition to AMD, in July this year, the media reported that Intel FPGA prices had risen. A letter from Intel PSG business line products to customers shows that due to the cost pressure of the supply chain and the continuous strong demand, Intel plans to increase the price of some FPGA products, involving Arria, MAX, Stratix, Cyclone and other product lines. The price of newer products will increase by 10% and the price of older products will increase by 20%.
FPGA chip development against the market?
Data shows that FPGA chip (field programmable logic array chip) belongs to logic chip, which can be divided into four categories according to functions: general processor chip (including central processing chip CPU, graphics processing chip GPU, digital signal processing chip DSP, etc.), memory chip, application specific integrated circuit chip (ASIC) and FPGA chip.
Compared with other three kinds of integrated circuits, FPGA chip is characterized by field programmability. After the manufacturing is completed, its functions are not fixed. Users can configure the functions of their own designed circuits through the special EDA software provided by FPGA chip companies according to their actual needs, so as to convert the blank FPGA chips into integrated circuit chips with specific functions. In addition, FPGA chips also have the advantages of low application development cost and short time to market.
Because of the above characteristics, FPGA chips are widely used in industrial control, network communication, consumer electronics, data center, automotive electronics, artificial intelligence and other fields.
In recent years, thanks to the rise of 5G, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies, the demand for data centers and automotive electronic semiconductors has surged, becoming an important application market for FPGA chips, with broad development space in the future.
This may be one of the reasons why FPGA chips can maintain strong demand and even increase prices in the "cold winter" of consumer electronics market depression.