Listen to your hosts Dave Jones & Chris Gammell talk about electronics design and the electronics industry in general. If you have any interest in electronics at all, from hobbyist/hacker/maker to engineering professional you'll find something of interest here.
They started in 2012, but really got started with their first product in 2017
Co-founder is Tony Ngai (CTO), both he and Sammy used to work at Altera
At first they were trying to make a higher growth company, to possibly get aquired quickly. In 2015, when Intel acquired Altera, there was a pause to all acquisition talks.
Interestingly, Xilinx is an investor, as well as Samsung
Building the first chip (the Trion) required Architecture, Software, IC design. All things have to work together.
Licensing IP
They ended up selling 1M units
Does first chip have to be niche?
ASSP
Trion is big in Computer Vision (CV) and sensing. It has hardware interfaces for Cameras / MIPI interface
Chip architecture also matters
Many CV users wanted to put inferencing functions on board, especially because it’s fast and flexible.
In traditional FPGAs, the routing switch is separate from the logic element. In the Efinix “Fine grain architecture”, it’s more closely coupled. See the image in this IEEE Spectrum article.
Logic elements are more “equivalent” logic elements
Trion on 40 nm Low Power (LP) process
The soon-to-be released Titanium is different. It has an upgraded architecture (though it’s still XLR).
Early users have seen a 4x improvement
Sammy says these chips are meant as much more than a Bridge device (like a CPLD)
Not doing a ton of IP internally, OK with pulling in other companies’ IP
Other vendors are integrating Efinix FPGA silicon into SIPs, using Chiplet form factors.
Simplified power bringup
Because doing specific FPGAs to integrate with others
Applications
Reconfigurable accelerator
Security
Auto
4 mask sets for Trion, 3 for Titanium
Titanium is on a 16 nm process node.
These chips are not meant for server farms, but they’re also not chasing the low end.
Features in the Titanium
DSP is more complex than just a MAC block
Targeting DSP blocks
Soft IP offerings
RISC V
Next 5 years they expect more processor offerings
Can run processor at 400-500 MHz
“Domain Specific SOC”
The Efinix RISCV offering is based off of the Vex RISC-V design, which won the 2018 Softcore contest, designed by Charles Papon
Efinix hopes these chips will enable AI engineers
Will Efinix use the open toolchain discussed on The Amp Hour regularly? No plans currently. Sammy contends that super competitve devices require vertical integration.
Efinix has a tool called the Interface Designer
Separate core from peripherals
Sammy is excited about interesting future applications like automotive vision. The car is a “moving supercomputer”
Q2 events showing Titanium and Dev kits are on the way. There will be parts out in the Summer, including the first released the TI60 out in Q3.
What are their challenges looking forward? Not money or tech, but how the company will change as they grow