Scaling Gets Scary

Altera needs to have its FPGAs capable of supporting 400G systems for processing HD video.

Moore's Law scaling, on its own, won't get it there.

Or rather it won't get it there within the power and cost constraints required for commercial viability.

So Altera proposes using Hardcopy blocks over as much as 20% of the FPGA to increase speed by 20x.

Another technique Altera will use is partial configuration which allows the chip to keep running while parts of it are re-configured, so allowing functionality to be stored off-chip, which permits a smaller chip size.

So you can't crank up the performance, and you can't reduce the power consumption.

So all you get from scaling is, density, and that's fine for memory.

But it raises a question about the future of other IC-types.