High Performance Microchip Supply - Under Secretary of Defense ...

__________________________________________________________________ FINDINGS
Software to program these devices are much, much
easier to develop than the equivalent custom IC
designs.
U.S.-based companies lead in the design and
manufacturing of programmable standard parts:
Texas Instruments (TI) is a leader in DSPs; IBM and
Freescale (formerly Motorola) lead in CPUs and
systems on a chip (SOC) with embedded processors;
Xilinx and Altera are leaders in FPGAs; and Intel is a
leader in CPUs and MPUs.
Hardware programmable standard products such as
PLAs and FPGAs are particularly important in
meeting the custom function needs of military
systems. The performance gap (in speed and power
dissipation) between PLAs and FPGAs and ASICs,
once a significant barrier to use of programmable
logic arrays, continues to narrow, making hardware
programmable devices an attractive choice for many
custom applications. Simultaneously investing in
further closing this gap and in new, efficient
programming algorithms for these devices may
allow the DOD to retain information superiority
without requiring as wide an assortment of ASICs as
in the past.
Although U.S.-based leadership does not in and of itself assure
the trustworthiness of these parts, it does put the DOD in a position
superior to that of potential adversaries, whose systems rely on U.S.based
suppliers and/or inferior parts procured abroad. This
advantage accrues not only to fielded weapon systems, but to all
aspects of the defense community and of U.S. national
infrastructures.
U.S. leadership cannot be taken for granted, especially given the global
consolidation underway in the semiconductor industry. Thus, it is especially
disconcerting that U.S. government research funding in this area has
continued its decline as a percentage of the GDP as shown in the figure
below.
HIGH PERFORMANCE MICROCHIP SUPPLY ___________________________________________
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