China's FPGA maker Gowin, founded in 2014, announced that the cumulative shipments of programmable logic devices (FPGAs) has exceeded 10,000 units. Last year's shipments were 8 million, 8 times the total of one million shipped in 2017.
The major management including CEO Joo Jinghui (朱璟辉) and CTO Song Ning (宋宁) has worked for 10 years at Lattice, an American FPGA company. Lattice, one of the major FPGA makers with Xilinx and Intel (Altera), was offered $ 1.37 billion from the Chinese capital in 2017, but President Trump prevented it from happening. "I am glad that we have achieved such a result so shortly after starting our business," said Gowin Semiconductor CEO Joo. "It will be an important milestone," he added.
An FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is a logic device that can be programmed to fine-tune a program, including hardware, during use. Thanks to this flexibility, it has been observed that there is a great potential for application to the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI.
"We signed a cooperation agreement with ARM last year," said CEO Joo. "We are the second FPGA supplier to use 'Design Start' after Xilinx,” he said in an interview.
"We have supplied more than 400 customers so far," said Gowin Semiconductor and added, "We have over 150 customers in Asia Pacific, Europe, and the US, excluding China." The applications include communications, industrial, medical devices, and LED displays.
