Intel has announced its intention to spin off its Programmable Solutions Business unit (PSG) into a separate company with an IPO within the next two to three years. PSG is expected to begin operating independently on January 1, with Intel continuing to provide support. Intel also expects to report PSG as a separate business unit when it releases its first quarter of 2024 earnings.
A number of industry insiders said in an interview with a reporter from China Business News that in recent years, the rapid growth of the automotive, data center and communication markets has driven the demand for FPGA (field programmable logic gate array), and Intel will split off the PSG department, which is mainly responsible for FPGA production, and promote its IPO, which can provide more freedom and flexibility. And access to more financing channels.
Or reshape the FPGA landscape
FPGA is less known to the outside world, which belongs to the logic chip class. Logic chips can be divided into four types of chips according to function, that is, general purpose processor chips (including central processing chip CPU, graphics processing chip GPU, digital signal processing chip DSP, etc.), Memory chips (Memory), application-specific integrated circuit chips (ASics) and field programmable logic array chips.
Intel acquired FPGA giant Altera in June 2015 at a price of $54 per share, totaling about $16.7 billion in cash. After being incorporated into Intel, Altera exists as a business unit of PSG, which deals with artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
The accelerated development of emerging markets such as data center construction, artificial intelligence and autonomous driving has driven the demand for FPgas to continue to grow. According to Gartner, the global FPGA market size from 2020 to 2026 will increase from $5.585 billion to $9.69 billion, with a CAGR of 9.6%.
Intel PSG business also rose, the report shows that from 2020 to 2021, Intel PSG growth rate of 16%, according to Intel 2023 second quarter earnings conference call disclosure, its PSG business unit revenue growth of 35%, three consecutive quarters hit a record high.
However, despite PSG's impressive growth rate, Intel has chosen to spin it off. Intel Executive Vice President Sandra Rivera will serve as PSG's chief executive officer.
Sandra Rivera said: "This is an exciting day for me personally and for the PSG team. Re-establishing PSG as a separate business unit will allow us to reach our full potential and remain a leader in this demanding and critical segment of the semiconductor industry." Our strategic relationship with Intel continues to be a great advantage because it gives us the greatest flexibility to address the fast-growing markets of automotive, data center and communications."
At the same time, Intel announced that for the next two to three years, Intel will retain a majority stake in PSG while it plans an initial public offering (IPO) of PSG and may explore opportunities with private investors to accelerate the growth of the business.
Intel CEO Pat Kissingler said: "Our plan to make PSG a stand-alone and initial public offering is another example of how we continue to create more value for our stakeholders. This will give PSG the independence it needs to continue growing its share of the FPGA market, differentiating itself from IFS with capacity and resilient supply, and allowing Intel product teams to focus on our core business and long-term strategy."
Semiconductor industry analyst Wang Zhiwei told reporters that as far as FPGA chip companies are concerned, they not only need to provide chips, but also need to provide FPGA-specific EDA software to configure the chips. Therefore, FPGA chip companies are not only integrated circuit design enterprises, but also integrated circuit EDA software enterprises. Intel PSG independent will have the opportunity to obtain private and public equity investment, which will help accelerate Intel IDM2.0 strategy, and more importantly, independent PSG division market share is expected to further increase.
According to relevant data, the main global FPGA suppliers include Xilinx, Intel, Lattice and Microchip and other overseas chip design companies, according to Gartner statistics, In 2021, Xilinx, Intel, Lattice and Microchip's market share will reach 51%, 29%, 7% and 6%, respectively.
Domestic manufacturers have a long way to go
"With the independence of Intel's PSG division, the further increase in market share may squeeze the domestic FPGA market." Wang Zhiwei thinks.
At present, the main domestic FPGA manufacturers are Unigroup Guowei (002049.SZ), Fudan Micro (688385.SH), Anlu Technology (688107.SH) and so on.
In fact, in recent years, with the rapid development of domestic industrial control, network communications, consumer electronics, data centers, artificial intelligence and other new generation of information technology fields, China's FPGA chip market continues to expand, the semiconductor industry chip localization development strategy and domestic technology enterprises independent and controllable procurement strategy to promote the market demand for domestic FPGA chips.
According to Frost& According to Sullivan data, China's FPGA market has grown from about 6.55 billion yuan in 2016 to about 15.03 billion yuan in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of about 23.1%. With the further acceleration of the research and development process of domestic manufacturers, it is expected that by 2025, the scale of China's FPGA market will reach about 33.22 billion yuan, and the compound annual growth rate will be 16.6% from 2020 to 2025. At the same time, domestic FPGA head manufacturers are also catching up and accelerating the process of occupying the market.
However, Wang Zhiwei also analyzed that the high threshold, difficulty, and high market monopoly are characteristics of the FPGA industry. At present, the domestic FPGA commercial market is still mainly based on 40nm process devices. The technology gap between domestic enterprises and their American counterparts is at least two generations, or even more than two generations. And now the monopoly characteristics of the entire FPGA industry are gradually increasing, which is not a good phenomenon for domestic companies that lack capital and technology.
Although the current FPGA localization rate is still at a low level, there is still a gap between domestic manufacturers and overseas manufacturers in terms of product richness and technical strength, but from the perspective of the R&D investment and revenue of domestic manufacturers in recent years, most of them have entered the harvest period and the track of a virtuous cycle.
Among them, Fudan Micro Electronics is an important supplier of the first million gate FPGA chip products in China. We have successfully developed multi-gate FPGA and heterogeneous converged system-on-chip (PSoC) chips, as well as converged field programmable (FPGA) and artificial intelligence (AI) reconfigurable chip (FPAI) for artificial intelligence applications, and related products have achieved batch production.
Minsheng Securities said in the research report that Anlu Technology, as a leading FPGA chip supplier in China, has continuously enriched the product layout, and has formed an FPGA product matrix composed of PHOENIX high performance, EAGLE high efficiency, and ELF low power product family. With EF2M45 chip and SWIFT family for industrial and video interfaces as the starting point, the FPSoC product matrix is constantly improved, as well as the full-process dedicated EDA software tool chain supporting the above product matrix, the logical scale, functional modules and performance indicators of the product coverage are constantly improved.