The roll-out of 28nm FPGAs in 2012 will make it the year we say "long live the programmable imperative", writes Moshe Gavrielov, president and CEO of Xilinx.
New 28nm programmable platforms are poised to transform the semiconductor landscape, serving as a centerpiece for engineering innovation and differentiation with today’s global electronics companies.
A convergence of long-term economic, market and technological trends continues to drive demand for a new class of devices. The key drivers include:
- Insatiable bandwidth demand in broadening markets
- Ubiquitous connected computing for everyone, everywhere
- The prohibitive up-front NRE costs and risk associated with Asics and application specific standard products, accelerating the "programmable imperative" trend toward broad adoption of FPGAs with minimal up-front NRE costs and lower risk
To address the relentless demand for hyper-connectivity and mobility in a wide range of end markets, designers will have to double the bandwidth of existing systems without an increase in power, form factor or cost – while delivering a differentiated product ahead of the competition.
The answer lies in combining chip-level integration and programmability on a single platform, while drastically reducing R&D costs and building flexibility into every aspect of the design process – something we call "programmable systems integration".
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