FPGA company puts pedal to the metal
In what it believes is one of the biggest breakthroughs in three decades of fgpa design, Achronix Semiconductor has begun shipping the world’s fastest fpgas. The Speedster family, with the SPD60 as its initial member, delivers up to 1.5GHz – three times the performance available from competing devices.
“Designers have been lulled into expecting only incremental performance improvements with each new generation of fpga,” claimed Achronix’ chairman and ceo John Holt. “Our product provides a disruptive leap in performance that opens up new worlds of application design previously unavailable to engineers using fpgas.”
The Speedster family uses the patented picoPIPE acceleration technology, which speeds the way in which data moves through the fpga fabric. The approach is asynchronous, relying instead on simple handshake protocols to efficiently control data flow. This approach is coupled with a 10.3Gbit/s serdes to produce high system throughput.
The device is manufactured using TSMC’s 65nm G+ cmos process.
