hi
fyi.
An article from Programmable Logic Design Line / EETimes
http://www.pldesignline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225700752
Matt
June 21, 2010
Xilinx to offer three classes of FPGAs at 28-nm
By Dylan McGrath
SAN FRANCISCO—Programmable logic maker Xilinx Inc. will offer three
distinct families of FPGAs at the 28-nm node, up from the two classes of
devices offered by the company at previous nodes, Xilinx announced Monday
(June 21).
The move to three families—including the high-end Virtex family, the
mid-range Kintex family and the low-cost Artix family—is one of several
changes Xilinx revealed Monday about its next-generation devices, known as
Xilinx 7 series FPGAs, which are scheduled to be available in the first
quarter of 2011.
As previously disclosed in February, the series 7 devices will also
feature a scalable architecture to enable customers to migrate 28-nm
designs between the product families much more easily than has previously
been possible, Xilinx said. The 28-nm series 7 devices will also feature
50 percent power reduction compared to the company's 40-nm devices and
offer capacity of up to 2 million logic cells, according to the company.
Patrick Dorsey, senior director of product management at Xilinx, said the
company chose to expand to three families of FPGAs at 28-nm after meeting
with more than 300 customers over the past two years. The customers told
Xilinx they wanted the flexibility to migrate designs between families
easily, reduced power consumption to enable higher performance and the
ability to meet power budgets and a mid-range class of device between
Xilinx's traditional high-performance and low-power offerings, Dorsey
said.
According to Moshe Gavrielov, Xilinx president and CEO, the series 7
devices will accelerate the trend of FPGAs displacing ASICs. By enabling
customers to use less power without compromising on higher capacity and
increased performance, the series 7 devices will address a market that is
roughly twice the size of that available to Xilinx's 40-nm Virtex-6 and
45-nm Spartan-6 parts, Gavrielov said.
Gavrielov, acknowledging that FPGA vendors have been claiming to take
market share from ASICs for years, said FPGAs are now poised to displace
them for a wide variety of applications. "We are not saying [ASICs] are
dead, but they are getting more niche, for more high-volume applications,"
he said. "FPGAs are becoming more mainstream."
The 28-nm families also extend Xilinx's targeted design platform strategy
introduced with Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 parts, now in volume productions,
Xilinx said. The strategy combines FPGAs, Xilinx's ISE design suite
software tools and IP, development kits and targeted reference designs to
offer a validated set of components that encompasses about 80 percent of a
design for various target applications, allowing customers to focus their
resources to add differentiating features in the remaining 20 percent or
so.
New applications that the series 7 families can address which were
previously the domain of ASSPs or ASICs include portable ultrasound
equipment consuming less than 2 watts and automobile infotainment systems
driven by 12 volts, as well as low-cost LTE baseband and femtocell base
stations, Xilinx said.
Xilinx said it is able to minimize total power consumption for the series
7 devices by using a high-k metal gate high-performance/low power process
optimized for low static power consumption. Working with foundry partners
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. and Samsung Electronics Co.
Ltd., Xilinx helped define the new process to achieve FPGA performance
requirements, while lowering static power consumption by 50 percent
compared to the alternative 28-nm high-performance process, Xilinx said.
The company then applied architectural enhancements to lower dynamic power
consumption both for logic and I/O, while also introducing intelligent
clock-gating technology with the release of ISE Design Suite 12, Xilinx
said.
In addition to providing 50 percent lower total power consumption compared
to Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGAs, the series 7 devices consume 30 percent
less power than other 28-nm FPGA device families, according to Xilinx.
The scalable architecture used by the series 7 devices is derived from the
Virtex series architecture and has been designed to simplify reuse of
current Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGA designs, Xilinx said. It is also
supported by Xilinx's EasyPath FPGA cost reduction solution that improves
productivity by enabling a guaranteed 35 percent cost reduction with no
incremental conversion or engineering investment, according to the
company.
Virtex-7 devices will deliver a two-fold system performance improvement at
50 percent lower power compared to Virtex-6 devices, Xilinx said. Compared
to Virtex-6, Virtex-7 will offer 1.8X greater signal processing
performance, 1.6x greater I/O bandwidth, 2X greater memory bandwidth with
2133-Mbps memory interfacing performance and over 2 million logic cells—
greater density than any existing FPGA, Xilinx said.
The Virtex-7 family will include XT extended capability devices with as
many as 80 transceivers supporting individual line rates up to 13.1Gbps
and devices that provide up to 1.9Tbps serial bandwidth, Xilinx said.
These devices will also offer up to 850 SelectIO pins, Xilinx said. Future
devices will also feature 28-Gbps transceivers, Xilinx said.
Gavrielov said high-end customers are grappling with an insatiable hunger
for bandwidth in the marketplace. "The blank canvas of the FPGA allows
them to innovate," he said.
The Kintex-7 family delivers Virtex-6 family performance at less than half
the price for a two-fold price/performance improvement while consuming 50
percent less power, Xilinx said. The family includes high-performance
10.3Gbps or lower-cost optimized 6.5Gbps serial connectivity, memory, and
logic performance required for applications such as high volume 10G
optical wired communication equipment, the company said. It provides a
balance of signal processing performance, power consumption and cost to
support the deployment of Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless networks,
according to Xilinx.
The Artix-7 family delivers 50 percent lower power and 35 percent lower
cost compared to the Spartan-6 family, according to Xilinx. The family
utilizes small form-factor packaging and the unified Virtex-series based
architecture to deliver the performance required to address
cost-sensitive, high-volume markets previously served by ASSPs, ASICs, and
low-cost FPGAs, the company said. The family meets low power performance
requirements of battery-powered portable ultrasound equipment and
addresses small form factor, low power requirements for commercial digital
camera lens control, as well as the strict size, weight, power and cost
requirements for military avionics and communications equipment, Xilinx
said.
Early access ISE Design Suite software supporting 7 series FPGAs is now
available, Xilinx said. Initial devices will be available in the first
quarter of next year, according to the company.
