Xilinx ships ‘world’s first heterogeneous 3d fpga’
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Xilinx has announced initial shipments of the Virtex-7 H580T fpga, which it claims is the world's first 3d heterogeneous all programmable product.
The heterogeneous – or stacked silicon – approach has allowed Xilinx to use the most appropriate technologies for the core fpga and the transceiver die. It says that having 28Gbit/s transceivers on a separate die from the core fpga fabric allows for better noise isolation, better signal integrity and improved design productivity. Using stacked silicon interconnect technology, the 3d integration of 28 Gbit/s transceivers is said to enable breakthrough bandwidth and signal integrity for Nx100G and 400G line card applications.
"With eight 28Gbit/s transceivers and ample logic capacity, the Virtex-7 H580T is the only fpga that can integrate additional line card functionality so that designers can implement a dual 100G OTN transponder on a single chip," said Mark Gustlin, system architect for wired communications at Xilinx. "Competing ASSP based solutions will comprise five devices, will remain unavailable for more than a year, will consume at least 40% additional power and will cost 50% more."
Combined with Xilinx's 100G gearbox, Ethernet MAC, OTN and Interlaken IP, Virtex-7 devices are designed to help customers overcome the system integration challenges of transitioning to CFP2 optical modules.
"We were impressed by the low transmit jitter of the Virtex-7 H580T's 28Gbit/s transceivers and by how quickly we were able to bring up a functioning link when combined with Luxtera's 4x28 Gbps single chip silicon photonic transceiver," commented Chris Bergey, vp of marketing at Luxtera. "Xilinx has clearly hit an industry milestone with this device because it allows makers of networking systems to overcome the challenges they face to enable more bandwidth."
