Slow roll-out portends fast, flexible FPGAs
By Brian Dipert -- EDN, September 30, 2004
In the seven years between the unveiling of Hewlett-Packard and Intel’s CPU development partnership and the shipment of first-generation Itanium systems, the electronics press received copious announcements, each providing only slight augmentation of previously available public information. Someone at Xilinx must have decided that Intel and HP had a good idea, because the company has drawn out the roll-outs of both the Virtex-II Pro and Virtex-4 architectures, albeit not for as long as in the Itanium case. Last December, Xilinx revealed its Virtex-4’s stripe-based ASMBL (application-specific modular block architecture) device-organization approach. In June, the company unveiled the product-family name. (I still don’t know what happened to Virtex-3.) And now it has finally revealed the specifics.
The Virtex-4 moniker comprises three product families—FX, LX and SX—with varying features and proportions reflecting application needs (Table 1). Key advancements over the Virtex-II family include the fact that the ExtremeDSP slices implement Altera-, Lattice-, and QuickLogic-reminiscent, full multiplier/accumulator structures. Virtex-II chips contained only hard-wired multipliers, and you needed to consume slower and less silicon-efficient FPGA resources to implement the accumulation function. Virtex-4 chips also implement differential internal clocking that operates as fast as 500 MHz, along with serializer/deserializer structures within each greater-than-1 GHz SelectIO buffer and RocketIO transceivers that operate as fast as 11.1 GHz. Xilinx even includes a Gigabit MAC (media-access controller) on its Virtex-4 FX chips.
The company is now shipping the initial devices in the LX family, along with preliminary support for all Virtex-4 proliferations in Xilinx’s ISE Version 6.3i design software.
The company plans to unveil SX devices in the fourth quarter, with FX chips to follow early next year. The Virtex-4 LX25 will cost $39.99 (25,000) by the end of 2005, and the Virtex-4 SX25 will cost $59.99 in the same quantity and time frame.
Xilinx, 1-408-559-7778, www.xilinx.com.
