Printers have always been a mainstream output technology for the computing industry.
Earlier times found impact and thermal printers as the cornerstone technologies most
frequently embraced. Within the last decade, this has dramatically shifted
to both ink jet and laser technologies, which are extremely price sensitive.
Also, note that most of the printer business is held by a relatively few large players.
Due to the widespread use of small office/home office (SOHO) operations and the corresponding
need for consolidation of desktop area, an even newer extension - multifunction peripherals
(MFP) - has arrived. These devices combine the FAX machine, copier, scanner
and printer all into a single unit. At the heart of the MFP output device is
fundamentally an ink jet or laser printer. Xilinx programmable logic - CPLDs
and FPGAs - have proven to be ideal system interface modules within printers, gluing
the embedded processors, EPROMs, DRAMs and Application Specific Standard Product
(ASSP) devices into a unified printer controller. Xilinx programmable logic
does all this and still retains the fundamentally low cost and low power required
of this market.
Dataquest has estimated the 1998 World Laser Printer market near 10 million units,
and the corresponding Ink Jet market near 45 million units. Typically, Ink
Jet units are in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars (US) and Lasers near a thousand.
Xilinx programmable logic plays a part in this market, and with the high volume XC9500XL CPLDs , CoolRunner™
and the Spartan™XL and Spartan™-II
FPGAs, an even greater part will be played in the future. |
Printer Market Overview