Xilinx is one of many companies that makes programmable FPGAs, and over the last couple of years they have invested heavily in expanding what FPGAs are capable of. With their series 7 devices, they have moved into the world of low power consumption, but high performance devices that can do a lot of data processing that would have once been thought beyond the capability of an FPGA. They are focused on improving the performance per watt, and keeping the size down too.
Improving Performance With FPGA
This means that you can now do more with your FPGAs, while keeping the costs of your projects down to a minimum. Whether you make ultrasound machines, digital cameras or plant and machinery monitoring tools, the capabilities of the Virtex, Kintex, Spartan and other series 7 offerings will excite you.
Power is one of the primary concerns of companies right now – you need to not only meet the thermal requirements of your devices, but also keep power consumption low, and have a machine that is reliable too. It is hard to find a baord that meets all of those requirements – but the FPGAs in the latest series are certainly a huge leap forward, consuming less power, and offering higher system performance. The 28nm family of FPGAs offer up to 2M logic cells, and up to 67Mbits of Block RAM. They offer 2x price to performance improvement, and are a 100x improvement on inter-die bandwidth/watt versus relying on a monolithic device. They are fast, versatile and high bandwidth, and they allow companies to innovate when prototyping, and make small, long battery life devices that can do tasks that might otherwise have been reserved for a traditional computer.
Artix offers low power consumption with good performance
The Artix offers low power consumption with good performance=, the Kintex is designed for balanced power/performance, and the Vertex offers the highest performance, with a little more power consumption, but still incredibly low considering the job that it is doing. Static power consumption has been more than halved for this generation, and dynamic and I/O power drain has been reduced as well. It’s rare that you would find such a huge breakthrough in both directions, and this opens the door for more scalable, optimized and complex applications across multiple industries. For this reason, more and more developers are exploring prototyping boards, and considering integrating the techology into their final production designs for everything from 3D TVs to e-readers and avionics. Consult Xilinx Distributor and professionals that can guide all about FPGA Xilinx products.
