Product Review
Altera's future high-performance FPGAs to use Intel’s 14nm tri-gate technology
Clive Maxfield2/27/2013 2:43 PM EST
As you may have heard, the folks at Intel are now in the foundry business. They’ve been ramping their foundry services for some time now with some smaller FPGA companies – now they've nabbed a big FPGA "fish" in the form of Altera.
The guys and gals at Altera and Intel have formally announced that they've entered into an agreement for the future manufacture of Altera FPGAs on Intel’s 14 nm tri-gate transistor technology. They say that these next-generation products, which will target ultra-high-performance systems for military, wireline communications, cloud networking, and compute and storage applications, will enable breakthrough levels of performance and power efficiencies not otherwise possible.
“Altera’s FPGAs using Intel 14 nm technology will enable customers to design with the most advanced, highest-performing FPGAs in the industry,” said John Daane, president, CEO and chairman of Altera. “In addition, Altera gains a tremendous competitive advantage at the high end in that we are the only major FPGA company with access to this technology.”
Altera’s next-generation products will now include 14 nm, in addition to previously announced 20 nm technologies, extending the company’s tailored product portfolio that meets myriad customer needs for performance, bandwidth and power efficiency across diverse end applications.
“We look forward to collaborating with Altera on manufacturing leading-edge FPGAs, leveraging Intel’s leadership in process technology,” said Brian Krzanich, chief operating officer, Intel. “Next-generation products from Altera require the highest performance and most power-efficient technology available, and Intel is well positioned to provide the most advanced offerings.”
Adding this world-class manufacturer to Altera’s strong foundation of leading-edge suppliers and partners furthers the company’s ability to deliver on the promise of silicon convergence; to integrate hardware and software programmability, microprocessors, digital signal processing, and ASIC capability into a single device; and deliver a more flexible and economical alternative to traditional ASICs and ASSPs.
If you found this article to be of interest, visit Programmable Logic Designline where – in addition to my Max's Cool Beans blogs – you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to programmable logic devices of every flavor and size (FPGAs, CPLDs, CSSPs, PSoCs...).
Also, you can obtain a highlights update delivered directly to your inbox by signing up for my weekly newsletter – just Click Here to request this newsletter using the Manage Newsletters tab (if you aren't already a member you'll be asked to register, but it's free and painless so don't let that stop you [grin]).
The guys and gals at Altera and Intel have formally announced that they've entered into an agreement for the future manufacture of Altera FPGAs on Intel’s 14 nm tri-gate transistor technology. They say that these next-generation products, which will target ultra-high-performance systems for military, wireline communications, cloud networking, and compute and storage applications, will enable breakthrough levels of performance and power efficiencies not otherwise possible.
“Altera’s FPGAs using Intel 14 nm technology will enable customers to design with the most advanced, highest-performing FPGAs in the industry,” said John Daane, president, CEO and chairman of Altera. “In addition, Altera gains a tremendous competitive advantage at the high end in that we are the only major FPGA company with access to this technology.”
Altera’s next-generation products will now include 14 nm, in addition to previously announced 20 nm technologies, extending the company’s tailored product portfolio that meets myriad customer needs for performance, bandwidth and power efficiency across diverse end applications.
“We look forward to collaborating with Altera on manufacturing leading-edge FPGAs, leveraging Intel’s leadership in process technology,” said Brian Krzanich, chief operating officer, Intel. “Next-generation products from Altera require the highest performance and most power-efficient technology available, and Intel is well positioned to provide the most advanced offerings.”
Adding this world-class manufacturer to Altera’s strong foundation of leading-edge suppliers and partners furthers the company’s ability to deliver on the promise of silicon convergence; to integrate hardware and software programmability, microprocessors, digital signal processing, and ASIC capability into a single device; and deliver a more flexible and economical alternative to traditional ASICs and ASSPs.
If you found this article to be of interest, visit Programmable Logic Designline where – in addition to my Max's Cool Beans blogs – you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to programmable logic devices of every flavor and size (FPGAs, CPLDs, CSSPs, PSoCs...).
Also, you can obtain a highlights update delivered directly to your inbox by signing up for my weekly newsletter – just Click Here to request this newsletter using the Manage Newsletters tab (if you aren't already a member you'll be asked to register, but it's free and painless so don't let that stop you [grin]).
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Max the Magnificent
2/27/2013 2:59 PM EST
I'm losing the ability to keep track of what's going on, because there's so much of it.
Altera and Xilinx are currently at the 28nm technology node, and they've both announced a roadmap to the 20nm technology node.
Meanwhile, the folks at Achronix have just announced that they've begun shipping their Speedster22i FPGAs that are built on Intel's advanced 22nm, 3D Tri-Gate transistor technology.
TSMC have only recently started talking about their own FinFET technology at 16nm, while Intel's second generation 3D Tri-Gate transistor technology will be at the 14nm technology node.
Now we hear that Altera plan on introducing a future generation of ultra-high-performance FPGAs using Intel's 14nm 3D Tri-Gate transistor technology.
I may be wrong, but I think this is the first time an FPGA company has announced a "next-next-generation" technology before their "next-generation" technology has hit the streets. We truly do live in exciting times!
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Max the Magnificent
2/27/2013 3:01 PM EST
Just to make things more confusing, I've heard rumors that some companies (not FPGA companies of course, because they would not stoop to this sort of thing) are re-braiding their 20/22nm offering as a "16/14nm equivalent" ... I'm not too sure about who is doing this or how they justify it ... if you have any information on this please post it here...
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Garcia-Lasheras
2/28/2013 4:12 AM EST
This is a war between two different approaches of designing transistors: FD-SOI (AMD, ST, GlobalFoundries) vs FinFET (TSMC, Intel, GlobalFoundries)
FD-SOI (Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator)roadmap has renamed the 20nm node as 14nm.
The argument is that FD-SOI transistors at 20nm node match in performance with 14nm FinFET ones.
The point is 3D geometry in transistors: now they have a significant "volume" and not only a "length".
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Garcia-Lasheras
2/28/2013 4:26 AM EST
NOTE: Intel Tri-Gate transistor is basically a multigate FinFET with three gate contacts per device (original FinFET design has only two gate contacts)
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nadare
3/1/2013 7:36 PM EST
let see what will really come to the market. Couple years ago when Altera planned to go with 32nm, they were offerred 28nm by TSMC. That's why there's no 32nm chips from them. People are trying to make Moore's law sustainable. Who knows in next-next-year, what technology will be proposed!?
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