Fast Technology reported on March 5 that it has been two full years since the acquisition of Xilinx, AMD FPGA products and business have been making new progress, and today officially released a new FPGA product "Spartan Ultrascale+", which is also the sixth generation of the Spartan FGPA series.
As the latest addition to AMD's family of cost-optimized FPGAs and adaptive SoCs, the new family is purpose-built for cost-sensitive edge applications and delivers more cost-effective, energy-efficient performance for a wide range of IO-intensive applications at the edge.
Founded in 1998, the Spartan FPGA family has a long history and has been used for 25 years in a wide range of applications, including some of humanity's greatest achievements.
For example, life-saving automatic defibrillators, such as NASA's Mars rover, such as CERN's particle accelerator, all have Spartan FPGAs.
The Spartan UltraScale+ series has up to 9 different sub-models, among which SU10P, SU25P, and SU35P focus on I.O expansion capabilities, SU50P, SU55P, and SU65P are mainly for board management, and SU100P, SU150P, and SU200P are suitable for IoT and industrial interconnection scenarios.
They vary in logic cells, total IO counts, IO logic ratios, on-chip memory, DDR PCIe hardware IP, GTH transceivers, packages, etc., with small devices having very high IO logic ratios and large devices adding more high-speed serial transceivers for edge devices, sensing, and control applications.
The series has up to 2180,000 logic units, equipped with up to 2679MB of on-chip memory (UltraRAM) with up to 572 IOs, and up to 33V voltage support enables arbitrary connectivity for edge sensing and control applications.
This is also AMD's first FPGA with a hardened LPDDR5 memory controller up to 4266MHz, while continuing to be LPDDR4X compatible and supporting up to eight PCIe 40 interface.
The package is also very flexible, with CSP and BGA sizes as small as 10 10 mm, up to 23 23 mm, and 12 12 mm in between.
Compared to the previous generation Spartan 7 series, it can support more GPIO in a smaller size.
Compared to the previous generation of the ATRIX 7 series, the smaller form factor can support the same amount of LC user logic, and the soft DDR memory controller can be upgraded to a hardened LPDDR5 memory director.
The Spartan UltraScale+ family uses a proven 16nm FinFET manufacturing process to reduce total power consumption by up to 30 percent and interface connection power consumption by up to 60 percent compared to its 28nm predecessor, the Atrix 7 series.
High performance in addition to high energy efficiency, up to 19 times, while the number of ios increased by 12 times, i o logic unit increased by 24x, memory controller bandwidth increased by 5x, PCIe bandwidth increased by 4x, transceiver bandwidth increased by 25 times.
Security features are also a major focus, such as IP protection, support for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and NIST-approved algorithms to defend against escalating cyberattacks and threats.
Support for physical unclonable functionality provides a unique fingerprint for each device for further security.
To prevent malicious tampering, PPK SPK keys are supported, expired or damaged security keys can be managed, differentiated power analysis is supported, side-channel attacks are prevented, and permanent tamper penalties are supported to further prevent misuse.
In addition, the new series maximizes uptime, features enhanced single-event interference performance, fast, safe configuration, and improved reliability.
Development tool support is also a major advantage of AMD FPGAs, with only one Vivado design suite tool and one Vitis unified software platform to support the entire FPGA, adaptive SoC portfolio, and provide more than 100 soft cores, greatly reducing the learning curve and serving the entire end-to-end design verification cycle.
AMD development platforms can also deliver results you can trust, including PVT-proven performance, certified functional safety, and advanced design analysis.
Since 2012, the Vivado Design Suite has been a leader in the field of tools.
AMD FPGAs offer a standard life cycle of more than 15 years, with the option of extended life cycles of up to 10 years.
Spartan UltraScale+ is supported as standard up to 2040 onwards.
That's one of the reasons why AMD FPGAs have been in the market for more than 40 years and billions of shipments.
AMD Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family samples and evaluation kits are expected to be available in the first half of 2025.
Technical documentation is available now, and AMD Vivado Design Suite tool support will begin in Q4 2024.