Xilinx ahead in the race by shipping 20 nm FPGAs

World's number one FPGA vendor Xilinx has announced the shipment of its 20 nm FPGA chips to its customers. It was also the earliest vendor to ship 28 nm FPGAs in the market, and so has gained higher market share in 28nm FPGA biz. The 20 nm FPGAs for Xilinx is fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC).

Xilinx has named the new family of FPGA made using 20 nm and deeper nodes as UltraScale devices. The UltraScale is aimed at getting rid of FPGA disadvantages over ASIC, but except the cost in case of volume use.

"This announcement underscores our first-to-market leadership commitment of delivering high-performance FPGAs," said Victor Peng, senior vice president and general manager of products at Xilinx. "The next generation starts now with the shipment of our new UltraScale devices, building upon the tremendous momentum we have established with our 7 series."

"The delivery of UltraScale devices on TSMC's 20nm process technology marks a new juncture for the semiconductor industry," said TSMC vice president of R&D, Dr. Y.J. Mii. "We are happy to see Xilinx continue to break new ground and deliver 20nm silicon to its customers."

Xilinx UltraScale target ultra-complex applications such as 400G OTN, packet processing and traffic management, 4X4 Mixed Mode LTE, WCDMA Radio, 4K2K and 8K displays, Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), and high-performance computing applications for the data center.

Xilinx is already working with TSMC in fabricating 16 nm FPGA chips. Some of the Xilinx competitors such as Altera is getting its 14 nm FPGA chips fabricated by Intel. Both the teams (Xilinx and TSMC) and ( Altera and Intel) are in for an interesting race of supplying the highly integrated FPGA first.

Availability: Initial UltraScale device samples are shipping now. General sampling begins in Q12014.

To know more visit: http://www.xilinx.com/ultrascale .