While sitting on my couch on this Nov 1 morning, I was struck by this eetimes piece mentioning an agreement between Intel and Achronix by which Intel will fab Achronix' Speedster22i FPGAs in their upcoming 22nm node technology. Achronix, as you might now, develops an alternative "asynchronous" FPGA technology that allows it to reach very high clock frequencies. I had lost track of this startup for the last months, but this agreement suggests to take another look into their technology.
Now, while the deal is great for Achronix, what it means for Intel is even more intriguing. Intel has never fab'ed for a third party vendor (AFAIK). As most comments on the eetimes article suggest, it may be the case that Intel has plans to acquire Achronix and start its own FPGA business based on this technology. Having Intel enter the FPGA business would certainly give Xilinx and Altera execs some headaches to keep their market share undamaged. But why would Intel want to enter this business? Maybe the key lies in the Intel Atom chip. A reconfigurable system on chip device based on the Atom technology might be a highly desirable device, similar to Xilinx' extensible processing platform based on hard ARM cores.
