Overview

With 50% of the U.S. consumer homes owning at least one PC, it is the most realistic residential gateway being envisioned for the future. Existing PCs can perform most of these functions comfortably.

However, PCs have big disadvantages, one and are not robust and easy to set-up. Also they need to provide equally fast multitasking capabilities. Today’s PC can hang and crash without any warning making it unreliable for a home network. Also, installing drivers is difficult and needs to be avoided.

The enemy in sight for the PC market is the information appliances. These are an emerging category of digital consumer electronics that provide the consumer with a low-cost, easy-to-use, instant-on device, lightweight, reliable, providing special-purpose access to the features and benefits of the Internet.

Market Research

An analysis from IDC predicts that the worldwide race between the PCs and information appliances is narrowing. The worldwide shipments of PCs is predicted to increase from 55 million units in 2000 to 67 million units in 2002. The worldwide shipments of information appliances is predicted to rise sharply from 24 million units in 2000 to 50 million units in 2002.

In the United States the unit shipments of information appliances will exceed the unit shipments of PCs. The shipments of PCs is predicted to grow from 21 million in 2000 to 25 million units in 2002. Comparatively, the shipments of information appliances is predicted to rise sharply from 12 million units in 2000 to 28 million units in 2002.

Market Trends

Some of the trends in the market include lower price points that are rapidly moving below $500, causing a blurred line between PCs and information appliances. However there are new downstream revenue opportunities such as Internet services, financing/leasing, and e-commerce options. Over the last few years there has been a super-efficient distribution via the Internet. Offsetting profit products such as servers, services, and workstations enable aggressive consumer prices. The PC market today has several strengths such as healthy demand, and price-per-performance improvements along with weaknesses such as being complex and error prone. These bring out unique opportunities and threats to the markets.

The opportunities include multiple PC households, new business models, the availability of new and innovative PC designs, and the expansion of Internet

The threats to the PC market are Web-based services and applications, saturation in key markets, low margins, and the arrival of information appliances.

PCs will live on because of the awareness in the market, flexibility in the PC platform, momentum due to the installed base, compatibility and interoperability, and the pace of rapid improvement.

Xilinx Solutions

The Xilinx's Spartan-II programmable logic solutions offer the flexibility to build products that can be reprogrammed in the field at costs far below any other programmable solution.

Residential gateway products will support multiple broadband access points and home networking interfaces. Spartan-II FPGAs provide system integration and interconnectivity to these interfaces, hence providing decreased time-to-market, increased time-in-market and the rapid product proliferation in this market. Please view the presentation to see how Xilinx solutions can help you build products for this fast evolving market place.