Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1391285
JULY 2021 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 45 the same time, people know there's so much computing power and they can grow a lot more. Another trend we are seeing is a slow migration toward a lot of supercomputing- type horsepower and to form factors that you could not conceive as possible 10 years ago. For example, there's a customer we are doing a product design for right now, a large package. I've not seen that big a package—8,000 pins on that. I remember almost 15 years ago we were really pounding our chests for doing 3,000 pin- count parts as a special. Andy Shaughnessy: I noticed that you have a big design team and it's primarily made up of EEs. Could you tell us about that? Irfan: Yes. It's a combination of EEs, and part of that offshore team is the material procure- ment team. For every group here at Whizz, we have an offshore group for them to basically enhance our coverage of those services. And we can do it 24/7. Generally, we can get about six working days out of a week and multiple shis when needed. Shaughnessy: And what led you to get into FPGA design? Irfan: at's because of our relationship with Xilinx. We have had a 20-year relationship with Xilinx, so we do a lot of projects with them. ey refer their customers to us, so we just grew in that space and that's why. Shaughnessy: Are you seeing an expansion of OEMs using FPGAs? Irfan: Yes, the FPGA market is very healthy and it's growing. So we're talking about both things. One is about designing systems and boards using FPGA, the other is designing and writing RTL soware code for the FPGAs. We do both. In a very typical scenario, Xilinx cus- tomers would come to us with a current refer- ence design, and they will want to add a bunch more features integrated to some other exist- ing system or designs, and those are the things we're very efficient with design. And then we are rewriting the FPGA codes to re-target for the newer platform or developing ground-up new code for FPGAs. Shaughnessy: And you said you'll work with people at any stage, right? Whether they come to you with the design started or whatever, and say, take care of this? Irfan: Yes. About five years ago we had a design from a company that had shelved the design for a couple of years. It was a very large telecom switch, and they came to us and said the people who were work- ing on this project were gone. It had four large Xilinx FPGAs on it, a lot of RTL code that had to be re-looked, understood, and redeveloped, and the whole system to redesign. We took on their project, it took about a year and a