Between Xilinx and Altera at 28nm, who is the winner?

FPGAs thrive by typical Moore's law node scaling advantage. Now Xilinx has officially announced its chips getting ready at 28nm, Altera is slightly ahead in announcing 28nm chips. Finally who is the winner? It's TSMC. Xilinx is getting its FPGA chips made at TSMC fab and also from Samsung. Altera is already a TSMC customer.

At 28nm, compared 40nm FPGAs, they will house nearly 3 times the number of gates and the power consumption is slashed quite well by >50%. Naturally speed is also enhanced. Now the telecom and wireless system designers can pack more DSP and other processor cores and also the high-speed bus interface inside single FPGA chip. This gives designers ample processing power to handle bandwidths such as 3G/4G (even more) and high-definition media content processing.

Programmable logic is becoming way of life for low volume system designers in telecom, wireless, medical and defense and aerospace application domains. Xilinx and Altera now making their chips available in 28nm will fuel the demand for FPGAs in lot more applications. Though ASIC is still a economical solution for large volume production but slowly the market share is eaten away by FPGAs, due to growth in application-specific ready-made solutions by FPGA vendors as well as increase in gate count per FPGA.

If hardware is as easily programmable as software, then why not programmable hardware! Despite recession FPGA makers had good year in 2009 and are easily get into fast growth mode in 2010.

At 28nm, Xilinx is finally unifying its two popular architectures Spartan and Virtex into a new unnamed architecture. The availability time for new architecture is yet not announced. 28nm chips are expected to be available by end of 2010, the software supporting these device are expected in 1st half 2010.

The technologies adopted by Xilinx to produce FPGA at 28nm are, high-K metal gate, and transistor choice and multi-gate oxide techniques to cut power consumption.

Amid the challenge by FPGAs, the ASIC semiconductor vendors still have a lot of room in offering value added and lowcost solution at lower power consumption than FPGAs. ASIC can produce same processing power compared to FPGAs by using far less number of gates.

Finally the board designer enjoys all benefits. Keep your design open for both ASIC and FPGA, decide the choice by your end market.