Xilinx has announced first quarter fiscal 2011 sales of US$594.7 million, up 12% sequentially and 58% on year. Net profits for the quarter reached US$158.6 million, compared to profits of US$148.5 million in the prior quarter and US$38 million a year ago.

Programmable logic vendor Altera set a new all-time high in quarterly sales in the second quarter of 2010. It also beat consensus analyst expectations for sales and net income during the quarter.

Altera has enhanced its Arria II GX FPGA variant with 6.375Gbps transceivers and up to 1.25Gbps LVDS support, while broadening the reach of the family with the addition of the new Arria II GZ FPGA variant. The company claimed its 40nm Arria II family provides the lowest power 6Gbps transceiver solutions shipping today, featuring up to 50% lower static power over competitive devices.

The solution features Altera's low-cost Cyclone III or Cyclone IV FPGAs, and IP from Eyelytics and Apical supporting AltaSens' 1080p60 A3372E3-4T and Aptina's 720p60 MT9M033 HD wide dynamic range (WDR) CMOS image sensors.

Following its recent move to TSMC's high-performance, low-power (HPL) process technology at 28nm, Xilinx is aggressively broadening the reach of programmable logic into the traditional ASSP and ASIC markets with three new FPGA families on its roadmap, the low-cost low-power Artix-7, the Kintex-7, and the high-end Virtex-7 due to be sampling in the first quarter of2011.

Altera has announced it is shipping in production the highest density member of its 40nm Stratix IV FPGA family. Featuring 820K logic elements, the device is for a variety of high-end applications including ASIC prototyping and emulation, wireless, wireline, military, computer and storage.

Altera now expects second-quarter revenues to be at the high end of previous guidance, growing 10-12% sequentially.

Xilinx has reported revenues of US$529.0 million for the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2010, up 3% sequentially and 34% on year. It expects sales for the current quarter to grow 5-9% sequentially.

Xilinx has announced that NEC Display Solutions has adopted the Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA family for three models of its DLP Cinema projectors.

Altera has reported net profits of US$153.2 million for the irst quarter, compared with profits of US$44.0 million a year earlier. "We are benefiting from growth in our 65nm and 40nm FPGAs as customer designs transition from prototyping into production," said company CEO John Daane.

The big news at Xilinx' annual analyst day on February 22: A new partner for foundry services at the 28nm node.

In addition to Intel acquiring an FPGA vendor, other acquisitions could be possible including Analog Devices buying a power management IC company and Microchip Technology buying a company to expand its presence in the microcontroller market.

Xilinx has completed multiple iterations of 28nm test wafers with TSMC, and could disclose the move to TSMC at its analyst day in March.

Intel may look to acquire an FPGA supplier such as Xilinx or Altera in 2010 in an effort to expand its presence in the embedded market as well as SoCs, according to a Wall Street analyst.

Xilinx and Altera, which together control more than 85% of the programmable logic market, are poised to grow twice as fast as the broader semiconductor industry going forward, according to a Wall Street analyst.

Spansion has announced its MirrorBit flash memory is now available as a verified configuration solution for the new Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA family.

"I am encouraged by the broad-based recovery in our business," said Moshe Gavrielov, Xilinx President and CEO. "September quarter operating margin was 20%, up from 15% in the prior quarter."

Virtex-5 sales are expected to increase significantly in the September quarter, surpassing 20% of total sales, according to Xilinx. The company is scheduled to report its second quarter financial results on October 14, 2009.

Chipmaker Altera has cut about 3% of its 2,700 person work force, according to a filing Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Xilinx has announced net income was US$38.0 million for the quarter ended June 27, 2009, down 56% from US$86.3 million a year ago. The specialized chipmaker also saw its net sales for the quarter slide 23% on year.

Second-quarter net income was US$47.4 million, down from US$98.0 million in the second quarter of 2008.

Logic-chip maker Xilinx said sales in its fourth quarter would decline less than forecast, helped by better-than-expected wireless-communications sales. The forecast comes a day after rival Altera presented a more optimistic -- though still muted -- view of first-quarter revenue than it had in January because of better-than-expected demand from manufacturers providing equipment for Chinese 3G wireless networks.

Altera Corp will spend US$20-25 million this year on its worldwide operations to grow new technologies and products. The company is also looking to open R&D sites in its Penang plant (Malaysia).

Programmable chipmaker Altera has slashed its fourth-quarter outlook, citing weaker-than-expected sales across all market segments. The company said it now expects revenue to fall 9-12% from the third-quarter, implying a range of around US$312-323 million.

...Well, 32-bit microcontrollers, especially multi-core designs with sophisticated peripherals, are in many ways highly flexible ASSPs. That is really a more accurate characterization than to call them MCUs in anything but a purely architectural sense. As such, they can compete against ASSPs from fabless semiconductor vendors. But they can also compete against FPGAs, offering lower design time, higher performance, much better power consumption, and much lower price for large designs...