Power savings, performance boost from latest Xilinx fpgas

Grouping the range of new devices under the heading of the Xilinx 7 series, the company claims that, by reducing power consumption and cost, it is making fpgas more relevant to a wider range of designers. "With every generation," said Vin Ratford, pictured, senior vp of marketing and business development, "Xilinx has pushed the envelope. Designers can now realistically think about replacing asics and assps with fpgas." The 7 series has three families – Virtex-7, Kintex-7 and Artix-7. Of these, Virtex-7 is new, Kintex parts are comparable to the Virtex-6 range and Artix-7 is comparable to Spartan-6. "Artix parts have 30% more performance than Spartan-6 devices," said Ratford, "35% lower cost and 50% less power consumption in package which has a 50% smaller footprint." Five devices are planned for the family, ranging from 17.9k to 352k logic cells and with 5.2 to 84.6Mbit of configuration memory. "Kintex parts will also consume 50% less power than Virtex-6 devices," Ratford continued. "This family will allow Xilinx to address new markets, including digital cameras, 3d tvs and high performance computing." There will be five Kintex devices, with 30.4k to 406.7k logic cells and up to 1540 dsp slices. Virtex-7 parts will offer 2.5 times the performance of current Virtex-6 devices. With up to 2million logic cells, the range will support line rates of up to 28Gbit/s. The performance of all devices is underpinned by TSMC's 28HPL process. Giles Peckham, European marketing director, said: "By sacrificing 5 to 10% of transistor toggle speed, we have reduced leakage by 65% with almost no difference in fpga performance." Xilinx-7 series devices will sample early in 2011.