Semiconductor processing power has advanced at breakneck speed over the last four decades, with chip performance doubling approximately every 18 months in the trajectory first predicted by Intel’s Gordon Moore in 1965. However, some experts believe that there are signs that this is slowing down and that this pace of improvement cannot last for more than another few years at most.

While this will be a subject of concern across many market sectors that depend on improvements in semiconductor performance for their own development, for other industries it is an immediate problem.

“Some problems have already outstripped the power of microprocessor based semiconductors and different solutions are needed,” said Allan Cantle, CEO of electronic systems design company Nallatech.

“To quote one of our major blue chip customers, for them to solve the problems they have today, they would have to wait 27 years for microprocessor technology to catch up assuming a continued progression based on Moore’s Law.”

Nallatech, a Cumbernauld-based company, has taken an alternative approach to solving the problems of how to achieve a step change in performance improvements within the confines of CMOS semiconductor technology. Nallatech is the world’s leading supplier of reconfigurable Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Computer systems. Based on Xilinx chips, these systems can create huge performance improvements by tuning these devices to specialist tasks.

Microprocessors are generic chips that can be reprogrammed at will, but in order to do so they sacrifice a great deal of processing power. ASICs chips, on the other hand, which are dedicated to one specific task, can run thousands of times faster than microprocessors, but cost millions to design and will only ever perform the one task they were originally designed for.

Microprocessors and ASICs represent two ends of the spectrum and FPGA is right in the middle, solving the dilemma of
flexibility versus speed by offering both the programmability of microprocessors and the speed and power of ASICs.

As Allan Cantle explained: “FPGAs are programmable chips that can be geared to specialist tasks, that don’t cost millions to design, and that also avoid the obsolescence issues that are problems for both microprocessors and ASICs chips. FPGAs can provide 100 times the performance of microprocessors at 1/10th of the cost of ASICs.”

Although FPGA systems could be relevant for all markets where speed and power improvements are desirable, Nallatech’s priority targets are those industry sectors with extremely high performance requirements, such as the aerospace and defence industries, image processing, scientific computing and also the satellite and telecommunications sector.

Nallatech has already built up an impressive global client list across these sectors, including major corporates such as Sony, Kodak, GE, BAe, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well the US Ministry of Defence.

Demand is high, with sales growing at 100% per year and projected to continue at the same rate. Since the company’s last round of investment from SEP and 3i earlier this year, Nallatech has taken on a European sales manager, and a new regional manager in the US and is now concentrating its efforts on developing the front end customer support and quality control structures needed to support the growing customer base.