The company designed and built three dimensional field programmable gate arrays (3-D FPGAs) and ranked third on the Wall Street Journal's annual "Next Big Thing" list in 2012.

The chips have 220-630 thousand 4-input lookup table (LUT) from the user point of view and are capable of working at 1.6 GHz physical clock speed.

[citation needed] Internally, ABAX chips use high-frequency (1.6 GHz) reconfiguration between up to 8 config states, named folds, to emulate a high number of FPGA-resources.

[4][5] As of July 2013, only 5 companies were allowed to use Intel's manufacturing process: Achronix; Tabula; Netronome; Microsemi; and Altera.

According to Tabula, this appeared to be a simplification that might deliver in production a new category of programmable devices (“3PLDs”) that are denser, faster, and more capable than FPGAs, yet still accompanied by software that automatically maps traditional RTL onto these novel fabrics.