Xilinx Ships World's First 28nm FPGA Device and Demonstrates Application Development Platform for Next Generation Systems

Kintex-7 FPGAs are built to provide optimal price performance at the lowest power to meet requirements for key applications. At the same time, the Kintex-7 FPGA family leverages the unified architecture shared across the 7 series, 28nm device families to enable customers to begin FPGA development now for designs that may ultimately migrate to Artix(TM)-7 and Virtex(R)-7 FPGAs.

The Kintex-7 devices are offered in conjunction with the Xilinx ISE Design Suite 13, AMBA(R) 4 Advanced Extensible Interface (AXI) bus protocol-compliant IP, and targeted reference designs. All of these Targeted Design Platform components run on the new Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 evaluation board currently being demonstrated for customers so that designers can evaluate the power consumption, performance, and capabilities of the new Kintex-7 K325T devices. Xilinx delivered the new devices in less than 90 days from tape-out by leveraging TSMC's 28nm High-Performance, Low-Power (HPL) process that relies on proven design and manufacturing methodologies.

The optimal price performance available in the Kintex-7 family makes it an ideal fit for our next generation visualization products,said Eric Wogsberg, CEO of Jupiter Systems. The new 7 series unified architecture also allows us to start developing products today that use Kintex-7 and later upgrade to more advanced products that will use the Virtex-7 FPGA family. This lowers our development cost and allows us to build scalable solutions.

As the world's fastest-growing oscilloscope vendor, we're continually looking for technology that offers higher performance, lower power, with high-speed transceivers. We're in a unique position of offering scopes with unparalleled real-time 32GHz analog bandwidth and sampling scopes for high-speed serial debug and characterization, as well as developing instruments that rely on capable high-speed serial I/O. We're excited to be one of the first customers to be shipped a Kintex-7 K325T FPGA due to its combination of performance, low power, and serial capabilities. The price performance available in the Kintex-7 family makes it compelling for next generation test equipment,said Joel Woodward, high-performance oscilloscope planner, Agilent Technologies. We've used Xilinx devices in multiple generations of oscilloscope where we are driven to lower development cost and build scalable test and measurement solutions.

Industry's First 28nm Targeted Design Platform Accelerates 7 Series FPGA Development

With the shipping of the first Kintex-7 FPGAs to customers, Xilinx is also introducing the industry's first 28nm Targeted Design Platform that combines the Kintex-7 K325T FPGA, ISE development tools, AXI 4 compliant IP, and an initial version of the base targeted reference design running on the Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 evaluation board. This new 7 series targeted design platform allows customer to immediately begin evaluation of the low power, higher performance, and advanced features available in the Kintex-7 FPGA family including Artix-7 and Virtex-7 FPGAs. Designers and engineers have an easy to use, flexible FPGA platform as an alternative to inflexible and slow-to-develop ASIC or ASSP-based silicon solutions.

In parallel with the development of the first 28nm FPGAs Xilinx refined the Xilinx ISE design tools to enable faster runtimes, enable designs that use up to 2 million logic cells, and shorten migration of AXI protocol-compliant IP initially developed in Virtex-6 and Spartan(R)-6 FPGAs to the 7 series from weeks to hours, said Bruce Kleinman, Corporate Vice President of Platform Marketing at Xilinx. As a result of these efforts Xilinx has been able to bring up the first 7 series targeted design platform within hours with a fully operational design that demonstrates the key benefits of the 7 series devices.

Kintex-7 FPGAs

The Kintex-7 K325T device is the first FPGA in this class to deliver the highest number of channels per dollar at less than 12 watts of power for LTE wireless radio cards and next generation wireless base stations. Kintex-7 FPGAs provide the optimized price performance required for flat panel displays, ultrasound equipment and many other applications and includes high-bandwidth, low jitter serial transceivers to address price sensitive wired communication applications. The Kintex-7 K325T FPGA is the first of 28 devices that make up the 7 series FPGA that includes the Artix-7 and Virtex-7 FPGA families.