I don't usually bother reporting stuff like "company xxx gets a new round of financing" or "person yyy just moved from one place to another." Why? Because  generally speaking I could care less (sorry, that's just the way it is), but in this case...

There have been some exciting developments in FPGA space recently, with some really innovative technologies leaping into the limelight. None more so than new FPGA company Tabula and their rather cunning Spacetime architecture (Click Here to see my blog on Tabula's ABAX FPGAs and the Spacetime architecture, which includes a video of yours truly waving one of these little scamps around).

Of course we've all seen new programmable logic companies appear, shout a cheery "Hello!", tease and tempt us with promises of delight, and then fade away into the nether regions from whence they came. But if I were a betting man, I'd say that the folks at Tabula have a real good chance of succeeding ... and when I say this, we should remember that they don’t want to be number #5 or #6 in the market – they firmly have their eyes set on at least a #3 or even a #2 position. Brave words indeed, but how will they achieve this?

Well, first of all there's Tabula's technology, which is really rather clever. In terms of raw logic density and memory density, their devices exceed the biggest and best 40nm FPGAs currently available on the market today (they combine this with extremely attractive pricing)

They also have a complete tool flow that appears to be very tasty (I'm going to visit them in a couple of days and see everything first-hand ... I will of course report back in a future blog). But perhaps the biggest thing they have going for them is a "Dream Team" of industry experts in management positions...

First we have Steve Teig, CTO and Founder. Steve is one of the inventors of modern place-and-route technology; he's been the CTO of four previous successful start-ups, and he was also CTO of Cadence Design Systems. Then we have CEO Dennis Segers, who used to be CEO of Matrix Semiconductor and a senior VP at Xilinx (Dennis is known as the "Father" of the Virtex line of FPGAs).

And the "names" go on and on, but the reason for today's announcement is that Tabula have persuaded Steve Haynes to come out of retirement and to join the Company's executive team as the VP of Worldwide Sales.

With more than 35 years of semiconductor sales and marketing experience, Steve is widely regarded as one of the most experienced and successful sales executives in the semiconductor industry. The folks at Tabula say that it's a testament to Tabula’s potential with Spacetime and the first ABAX 3PLD family that Steve has decided to come on board.

Steve pioneered FPGA sales at Xilinx for 18 years and was instrumental in growing sales to $1.6B annually. Having retired in 2005 when he was SVP WW Sales and Support, he maintained his relationship with Dennis Segers, with whom he worked closely at Xilinx for a number of years. The way I hear it, as Steve became more familiar with Tabular and the ABAX 3PLD value proposition, he was compelled to come out of retirement to build the sales and support organization as the Company starts to go to market.

"Having the opportunity to work with Dennis Segers again, as well as the rest of the Tabula team, is very exciting, says Steve, "I believe that our 3PLD technology offers our customers the most effective programmable solution, with three times the functionality, and up to five times lower price points than our competitor's on the same advanced 40nm process. World class sales and applications support will ensure the successful deployment of the ABAX 3PLDs in our customers' products as we look to address the $70B logic market opportunity ahead of us".