Industry Expert Blogs

Today, Xilinx unveiled three new series of FPGAs all based on 28nm process technology from Samsung and TSMC. The three families are called the Virtex-7, Kintex-7, and Artix-7 series. All three FPGA families feature programmable I/O drivers with I/O voltages as low as 1.2V, which theoretically permits the use of all advanced, single-ended SDRAM interfaces such as the low-voltage LPDDR2 and high-speed DDR3-2133 memory interfaces. Devices in the low-end Artix-7 FPGA family, packaged in low-cost wire-bond packages, have as many as 450 I/O pins. The middle Kintex-7 FPGA family, available in flip-chip packages, have as many as 500 I/O pins and the high-end Virtex-7 FPGA devices have as many as 1200 I/O pins. The Artix-7 and Kintex-7 FPGAs are largely differentiated by performance (with some larger Kintex-7 devices offered) and unit price. The Kintex-7 and Virtex-7 FPGAs are differentiated by gate and I/O capacity and unit price.