It's harder than ever these days to choose the silicon technologies that comprise a complex system such as a wireless base station, a telecom central-office switch, or an enterprise router. Design teams must deal with evolving standards that keep system requirements on the move. Power and cost aren't always paramount, as is the case in consumer devices, but they still come into play. Reliability and service level ultimately matter the most to the carriers that deploy communications gear. So, design teams must weigh the flexibility of programmable logic against the performance of ASICs and the low cost of ASSPs (application-specific standard products) to find the right mix of ICs in any given system. Moreover, many systems for applications other than communications share the same challenge. Communications equipment, for both wired and wireless applications, remains the top market for programmable-logic vendors. Xilinx, for instance, earns about 47% of its $1.6 billion in annual income from the communications segment. Before the so-called Internet bust in 2000 to 2001, programmable-logic vendors had even greater percentages of their earnings tied to the communications industry.
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