Date: 04/06/2009

40 nm FPGA chips and development kits

Altera and Xilinx are both early entrants into the club of semiconductor manufacturers who are making devices at and below 40nm. 40 nm is a costly option over 65nm due to the exponentially raising mask and design cost. But for a FPGA user who is always looking for additional power in his/her FPGA design, 40nm based FPGA gives more room for increasing additional functional blocks or to scale up the processing power.

Altera has announced the availability of development kit for their 40nm-based FPGA chips Stratix IV GX family. Stratix IV GX family and the development kit (both hardware and software) addresses the needs of fast processing and high -speed communications, a must requirement in designing latest telecom base equipments such as 3G LTE base stations, and high speed optical networking equipment.

The other leader in FPGA, Xilinx has also made available a 40nm FPGA family called Virtex-6. Both Virtex-6 and Stratix IV GX offers very interesting features. The specification comparison between these two devices gives a tough time to choose one among these.

The beauty of 40nm FPGAs is, they beat ASICs in performance, but makes design-engineer life complex due to the differences in designing. Development kits and lot more 3rd party tools are to be used to speed up FPGA based designs.

Read this closely related article from a FPGA development tool vendor available at url,
http://www.gaterocket.com/device-native-verification/bid/7966/Mammoth-FPGAs-Require-New-Tools

FPGA technology and market is growing faster than other semiconductor devices. The other good thing about FPGA is, even during recession its market is growing.