When we think about China, a few things come to mind- cheap labor, lack of protection for IP, perhaps even that they are a little behind on the technology curve.  Well, don’t get too comfortable in the feeling that the last one will always be the case. Consider the example of a startup company called S2C. They were founded in San Jose California back in 2003 and set out to develop some rapid prototyping products. They had experience in this area having been part of the now defunct Aptix (the remnants got bought by Mentor).

I recently talked to Steve Pollock, their new representative for the US. He told me this: The founders decided that development in the US was too costly and opened their Shanghai development center in early 2004. Late in 2005, S2C released its first rapid SoC development system: IP Porter.  S2C decided to focus on the Far East market, and China specifically. Then in 2006 they opened the Beijing and Shenzhen sales offices.  Since then, they have signed distribution agreements in Taiwan, Korea, India, and Japan. Only now are they considering sales in the US, or in other words, the Far East had 5 years of exclusive access to this technology.

They have just announced their 4^th generation product that is based on Altera's 40-nm Stratix® IV field-programmable-gate-array (FPGA). They claim “Equipped with two Stratix IV EP4SE820 FPGAs, each featuring 820K logic elements (LEs), the Dual S4 TAI Logic Module supplies up to 30 million ASIC gates of capacity and provides 1,286 external I/O connections.  Multiple TAI Logic Modules can be stacked or mounted on a interconnect mother board to meet even larger gate count needs.” But they don’t just stop at FPGA capabilities, they go on to say “The S4 TAI Logic Modules can run both 2GB of DDR2 and 2GB of DDR3 memory at up to 667MHz.  S2C offers a large library of off-the-shelf daughter modules, such as SRAM, DVI, PCIe and Gigabit Ethernet, to further accelerate customers' construction of FPGA prototypes for their applications.”

So, this may be a taste of what we can expect in the future. If it is cheaper to develop products offshore, and there is a thriving local market for the products, why bother with the expense of trying to penetrate the US market, at least until it makes economic sense for them, and we may find that for many applications, that it may never make sense – given how small the US market is compared to China, or India…

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Brian Bailey – keeping you covered