COVER STORY
will soon roll out the Virtex-7 H870T device, which will have sixteen 28Gbps transceivers, seventy-two 13.1Gbps transceivers and 876,160 logic cells. Goldhammer said that if a customer used all the transceiver capabilities of the H580T device, they could conceivably have a design with a serial connectivity totaling 2.78 terabits per second. “It was impractical and cost-prohibitive to place that many 28-Gbps transceivers on a monolithic FPGA,” he said. “Fortunately, SSI technology enabled us to create a scalable FPGA family today that has eight to sixteen 28-Gbps transceivers.” ASSP suppliers and other FPGA vendors have at most four 28G transceivers. This seems indicative of
Third Quarter 2012
the challenges in doing the job monolithically in 40- and 28-nm processes. The Virtex-7 H870T device is targeted at the next generation in wired communications—the 400G market, Goldhammer said. “The 400G market is a ways off, and if anything, companies are just starting to look at it in their labs and the standards bodies haven’t gotten to it yet,” he said. “What’s beautiful is that we already have a device that’s capable of doing it. We can help them speed up development of 400G, speed up the pace of innovation.” In addition to the Virtex-7 H580T and H870T FPGAs, Xilinx will also release as part of the 28-nm family the Virtex-7 H290T. By leveraging Xilinx’s 3D SSI
technology, the H290T will offer twentyfour 13.1-Gbps transceivers, eight 28Gbps transceivers and 284,000 logic cells. Goldhammer said the Virtex-7 H290T is particularly well suited for the 2x100G gearbox market. First silicon of the Virtex-7 H580T FPGAs is shipping to key customers today, with development tool support available in the recently announced Vivado™ Design Suite. Customers interested in using the Virtex-7 H580T device can contact their local Xilinx representative for further pricing and availability details. You can also find new white papers and videos on Xilinx’s 28-Gbps Serial Transceiver Technology page: http://www.xilinx.com/products/ technology/transceivers/index.htm.
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