Marking the first shock withdrawal from the ultra-high rated business of making applications-specific integrated circuits, Intel Corp says it is to wind down its applications-specific operations, withdrawing from the market for gate arrays and limiting its involvement to standard cell business. It reckons that it still has an edge here because it is able to offer its broad array of microprocessors as standard cell building blocks that can be customised with additional circuitry to specific applications. It decided to pull back from gate arrays because its total applications specific business was only $25m last year, and won’t reach its target of $75m this year. It blames fierce competition from the likes of Fujitsu Ltd, Toshiba Corp, NEC Corp and Oki Electric for its failure in gate arrays.
