"Beyond Moore's Law," FPGAs or Technology Propulsors for Semiconductors

FPGA designers whose product designers can freely rewrite logic are making rapid progress. From the perspective of the entire semiconductor industry, it can be said that for the first time, the entire industry is in full swing in introducing new technologies. FPGA "Virtex-7 2000T", which was supplied by Xilinx from the end of October 2011 in the United States, is an example. This FPGA uses the “stacked silicon interconnect (SSI)” technology that arranges multiple FPGA chips on a Si transfer board and packages them in a single package. The Virtex-7 2000T is lined with four identical FPGA chips fabricated with 28nm process technology. The advantage of SSI technology over mounting a chip on a package substrate is that it can increase the wiring density between chips and shorten the wiring length.

The surprising thing about the Virtex-7 2000T is that the total number of transistors formed on the chip is 6.8 billion. Even from the gate count of the standard cell ASIC, this figure is quite large, an FPGA with 2 million logic cells equivalent to about 30 million gates. Open Xilinx's homepage, the words "Virtex-7 2000T: More than Moore" are impressive. The reason why the company writes this way is because LSI manufacturing technology, despite using a 28-nm process, is one generation ahead, and it has achieved a large-scale FPGA equivalent to a 20-nm process.

The large-scale enterprise in which the FPGA industry and Xilinx have formed a pair of companies, the United States, Altra Corporation, is also adopting new technologies. Altra is developing and planning to use FPGAs with optical interfaces after 2012. By adopting optical wiring in the ultra-high-speed transmission portion of the FPGA, it is expected that there will be "low loss", "can achieve long distance and excellent extensibility", "easily configure", and "be able to use low-cost substrate materials" compared with the conventional electrical wiring. Etc.

In order to adopt this new technology of optical transmission, the system cost that the entire equipment manufacturer must bear must be reduced to a level comparable to or lower than that of electrical wiring. If it cannot be achieved, there will be no hope of universality. One of the efforts made by Altra Corporation to reduce system costs is mainly reflected in the connection of FPGA packages and optical wiring. Specifically, the optical cable is directly connected to the semiconductor package via the connector. At this point, the wiring does not need to be fully photochemical, and only the portion of the wiring that requires ultra-high speed transmission is used for optical transmission, and the remaining signals can still use the conventional electrical wiring.

As long as the FPGA market continues to grow, the trend of FPGA companies competing for new technologies will accelerate. FPGA is looking forward to being a new technology advancer in the semiconductor industry.