Xilinx continues record fast 7 series FPGA product rollout

SAN JOSE, USA: Xilinx Inc. announced it has reached an industry milestone with over 200 design wins in just over six months for its newest line of 7 series FPGA (field programmable gate array) devices, which began shipping in March of this year.

To date, the company has shipped thousands of Virtex-7 and Kintex-7 FPGAs worldwide, addressing a diverse set of applications, ranging from high performance defense RADAR systems and next-generation 200G wired communication bridges to ultra-high resolution medical imaging equipment and cutting edge test and measurement equipment.

A formidable combination of market-tuned devices and unified 28nm architecture is enabling Xilinx to execute the PLD industry's fastest rollout. In addition to providing customers with access to 28nm technology in record time, Xilinx 7 series FPGAs address the universal requirement for the low power, while achieving the highest performance with an optimal combination of logic, DSP, and high speed serial channels.

"The PLD industry will continue to outperform semiconductor market growth, driven by increased customer demand in applications that have historically fell into the ASIC realm," said Jordan Selburn, principal analyst at market research firm iSuppli. "With each new node, PLDs can address more design sockets in an expanding range of end applications. By rolling out 28nm products ahead of the vast majority of their ASIC and ASSP competition, led by Xilinx in March 2011, PLD suppliers are poised to benefit significantly from this accelerating trend, and the industry is forecast to continue enjoying growth rates that exceed the semiconductor industry overall ."

"We are glad that we can help Xilinx achieve this milestone," added Jason Chen, TSMC senior VP, Worldwide Sales and Marketing. "This collaboration combines Xilinx's design expertise and TSMC's advanced technology platform to deliver great values to customers. We believe this tremendous synergy of strengths can create a win-win situation for Xilinx and its customers."

Xilinx is fueling the highest bandwidth systems with Virtex-7 FPGAs and meeting aggressive cost and power requirements with Kintex-7 FPGAs for wide range of applications in the fastest growing segment of the FPGA market. The remaining 7 series family – Artix-7 FPGAs – is on track for shipments in the first quarter of 2012.

"Since participating in the original Virtex development program over 12 years ago, our R&D team has counted on Xilinx FPGAs to design high resolution medical displays for diagnostic radiology," said John Beck, Principal Engineer, at Dome by NDS Surgical Imaging, a global leader at the forefront of innovation in medical imaging technology. "A combination of price, performance and low power consumption made Kintex-7 a good choice for our newest line of Dome S10 ten-megapixel medical displays for mammography. We were able to integrate two complete DisplayPort interfaces, IP also developed by Xilinx, which will take full advantage of Kintex-7 to deliver image viewing without compromise, addressing the need for both impeccable diagnostic quality, as well as the demands of the radiology environment."

Xilinx is offering three classes of 28nm FPGA devices and delivering on multiple industry firsts to meet today's market requirements. To dramatically lower power, Xilinx 7 series FPGAs are manufactured using TSMC's 28nm HPL (high-performance/low power) process. To increase customer productivity and shorten development time, 7 series FPGAs are built using a unified, scalable architecture for easy migration of 28nm designs between product families. Finally, to address customer demand for steep increases in capacity and system bandwidth, Xilinx is pushing the envelope with its 2.5D stacked silicon interconnect (SSI) technology to deliver the world's largest FPGA of all time this quarter: the 2M logic cell Virtex-7 2000T FPGA.