Date: 28th June 2010
 

At 28nm FPGA chips ready for more applications

Xilinx applies Moore's Law to its present Virtex 6 family FPGAs to give birth to a new 28nm '7- series' of FPGAs; more than doubling of logic gates and slashing of power consumption by 50% and the speed is also enhanced significantly; the typical Moore's law benefits to semiconductor chips. This move triggers another exponential growth of applications for FPGAs.

The new 7 series FPGAs made using 28nm high K metal gate semiconductor process serve both low cost requirements as well as high performance requirements. 7 series includes Artix-7, Virtex-7 and Kintex-7.

Xilinx says the low cost version Artix-7 can replace multiple number of ASSPs and ASICs in digital consumer electronics applications such as digital camera or any such digital audio/video processing/capturing consumer gadgets. If an audio/video related digital consumer electronics designers not evaluating the use of FPGA in their latest design, they are missing a lot, particularly if the production-volume is in the range of 10-20 million units.

The high performance Virtex-7 can give very tough competition to ASICs used in telecom and such high intensity (data-processing) application. Virtex7 packs 2 million logic cells allowing designers to pack muti-core processors in a single FPGA. When this writer asked Victor Peng, Senior VP of programmable platforms development at Xilinx, how many microblaze processor cores this Virtex 7 can pack, he said easily a 100. The power consumption levels are on par with ASICs and the data speed possible is up to 28Gigabits/second line rate. Victor Peng says there are compelling opportunities for developers to rapidly leverage next generation programmable platforms.

The mid range version Kintex 7 offers same silicon benefits of Virtex-6 but at half the cost and half the power consumption.

Xilinx has in its platter, the FPGA devices serving both price and performance and the mid-range requirements. This is good news for FPGA designers because with this level of performance there is a good chance of exponential growth in use of FPGAs in embedded systems and also in medium volume consumer gadgets.

Altera is the first to release 28nm FPGA family called Stratix V by leveraging high K metal gate semiconductor process of TSMC. But this Xilinx's new 7 series outperforms Stratix V. Victor Peng says radiation hardened versions of this family will be made available later.

So, being attempting to be ahead in many market aspects of FPGA, Xilinx at this moment trying to lead in all application-dimensions of FPGA chip. It can be said Xilinx is hitting many birds in single stone.

The chip seller's mantra is to raise the complexity of the FPGA chip but simplify the design process for FPGA users. Not only FPGA even other semiconductor vendors following this trick.

To learn more on 7 series visit http://www.xilinx.com/technology/roadmap/7-series-fpgas.htm