July 17, 2012 -- Xilinx, Inc. today announced first shipments of its Artix-7 FPGA family. The new devices extend the reach of FPGA technology to applications requiring performance capabilities traditionally served by Virtex FPGAs, but with the form factor of small, low-cost programmable devices. Makers of portable medical, hand-held radio, and small cellular basestations can now leverage high-end all-programmable FPGA capabilities to a growing number of products and expand their markets.

For portable applications where advanced functionality remains paramount, Artix-7 devices deliver best-in-class system performance, power efficiency, compactness and low cost. With the first Artix-7 A100T device shipments to customers, all of Xilinx's 7 series and Zynq-7000 families are now available in silicon.

The Artix-7 family pushes performance limits at the lowest levels of power consumption because Xilinx chose TSMC's High-Performance, Low-Power (HPL) process for its 28-nm portfolio. This means that developers can achieve sub-watt total power consumption for battery powered applications such as secure software-defined military radios, where Artix-7 devices can offer 35% lower power consumption compared to competing solutions. Designers can combine the latest encryption IP and modem functions on a single chip for meeting size requirements while lowering BoM. Also, the integrated DSP capabilities in the largest member delivers 1,306GMACs of signal-processing performance for wideband waveforms.

The Artix-7 family offers 65% lower static and 50% lower dynamic power consumption than previous generation devices while delivering up to sixteen 6.6-Gbps transceivers, meaning builders of portable ultrasound equipment can achieve the highest image resolution for meeting JESD204B high-speed serial interface standards. At the same time, they can extend battery life and meet safety standards while implementing a 128-channel beam former at 40% less power than alternative FPGAs.

For builders of microwave backhaul equipment supporting 4G rollouts around the world, Artix-7 devices enable developers to integrate modem and packet-processing functions on a single device and have the highest performance per watt for delivering intelligent bandwidth

Availability

The first Artix-7 A100T FPGAs are available today with production qualification scheduled for Q1 of CY2013. Designers can begin their Artix-7 family designs today using Xilinx design tools.