Motorola Inc quietly pulled the plug on its field programmable gate array business last month as part of the major restructuring its Semiconductor Products Sector division is currently embarking on (CI No 3,421). The company has been in the FPGA programmable logic business for six years, through a partnership it established with Pilkington Microelectronics Ltd from Manchester in the UK. Pilkington was eventually acquired by Motorola in March 1997. Its main product was the static RAM-based MPA1000 family, but in February of this year, Motorola said it was planning to integrate programmable logic with its 32-bit ColdFire RISC cores, under the name Core+ (CI No 3,350). The first products had been due for release in the third quarter of this year. It has now integrated its 75-strong FPGA teams from Manchester and Phoenix, Arizona, in with its newly announced Advanced Systems Technology Labs (CI No 3,452) where its main system-on-a chip efforts are now being focused. Motorola says it will continue to offer customer specific embedded systems using its Mcore and PowerPC cores. It says it’s not interested in staying in a market where it is not either the number one or number two player. Its exit leaves the FPGA market, which represents about 40% of the total programmable logic market, forecast to reach $2.2bn this year, to companies such as San Jose, California-based Xilinx Inc, its neighbor Altera Corp and Sunnyvale, California-based Actel Corp.
