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Printer Market Overview 


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. 

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