Shipment has begun of Xilinx's Kintex-7 K325T FPGA, built on TSMC's high performance, low power 28nm process technology. It is the first of 28 devices to use the 7 series architecture, so customers can migrate to Artix-7 and Virtex-7 FPGAs if necessary. The company believes it is the first FPGA in this class to deliver the highest number of channels/$ at less than 12W for LTE wireless radio cards and next-generation wireless basestations. The high bandwidth, low jitter serial transceivers can be used in cost-sensitive wired communication devices as well as in flat panel displays and ultrasound equipment. The 7 series FPGAs, which include Artix and Virtex, use Stacked Silicon Interconnect technology to deploy the world's highest density, 2million logic cell FPGA, the Virtex-7 2000T device. Each device is built with a mix of features including dual 12bit, 1Msample/s general purpose ADC converters, transceivers, DSP blocks and on-chip memory. The Kintex-7 K325T FPGA is sampling now and the Targeted Design Platform using the Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 evaluation board will be available in Q4. The Virtex-7 485T FPGA and the 2million logic cell 2000T will begin initial sampling in August and November of 2011, respectively. Artix-7 FPGA initial samples will ship Q1 2012. An evaluation version of Design Suite is available.
