Wednesday, March 08, 2006

RapidChip R.I.P.

Being modest, I hate to say "I told you so", but LSI scraps ASIC line, plans to sell DSP unit seems consistent with the doubts about RapidChip that I expressed in this post in July 2005. Is there a stampede for the doors? A pioneer in the field of "structured ASIC", Lightspeed Semiconductor, exited the market just last month.

Too bad, I was sort of longing for the simple days of yesteryear when we did Gate Arrays, and these products resembled re-warmed Gate (or Embedded) Arrays.

1 comment:

Sammy Cafe said...

Good vision. I also remember the structured ASIC buzz. At that time it sounded like innovative. But as you point out, "for what applications?". ASIC mean Application Specific, Structured ASIC makes things confusing.