A lot of things will change at the 45nm process node, but Xilinx intends to be a very early user of the technology for its FPGAs.
“45nm is going to be a tough technology node”, says Wim Roelandts, CEO of Xilinx, “ we’ll be using immersion steppers and anytime you have a new piece of equipment it has a training period.”
“There will be a big change in the transistor structure”, adds Roelandts, “the whole transistor structure will change at 45nm, and there could be a move to high k dielectric materials and metal gates.”
However Xilinx is planning early use of 45nm. “We have already done tape-outs of 45nm test chips and the first 45nm products will be taped out at the end of 2008”, says Roelandts, “our engineers are mostly working on 45nm.”
Xilinx is currently shipping eight devices using a 65nm process. “The process is very very stable. The design is stable. There are no issues”, says Roelandts.
“A few years ago people were saying you can’t have advanced technology if you’re fabless”, says Roelandts, “but we work closely with the equipment people (Roelandts is on the board of the biggest of them Applied Materials). Very few fabless companies get involved at such an early stage of the process development. We helped our foundries (Toshiba and UMC) to get 65nm to market which is why we can do high performance 65nm processes and TSMC can’t.”
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