Xilinx, TSMC Collaborate to Produce FPGAs through FinFAST Process

Xilinx (News - Alert) and TSMC have joined hands to produce field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that will be built based on TSMC’s 16-nanometer FinFET (16FinFET) process. This program has been named ‘FinFast’ by Xilinx.

Moshe Gavrielov (News - Alert), president and CEO of Xilinx said, “I am extremely confident that our ‘FinFast’ collaboration with TSMC on 16nm will bring the same leadership results that we enjoyed at previous advanced technologies. We are committed to TSMC as the clear foundry leader in every dimension, from process technology to design enablement, service, support, quality and delivery.”

It is expected that the two companies will work in tandem to optimize the ‘FinFET’ process with Xilinx’s UltraScale architecture. The program has been designed to produce 16FinFET test chips in 2013 with production starting in 2014.

TSMC is also planning to complete its production schedule for the 16FinFET process by 2013. The Xilinx/TSMC collaboration will benefit from this fast schedule with cost and power savings.

For this purpose TSMC’s CoWoS 3D IC manufacturing flow will be leveraged in order to enhance 3D IC systems integration and system-level performance. More products using this technology will follow soon, said officials.

Morris Chang, TSMC chairman and CEO, remarked, “We are committed to working with Xilinx to bring the industry’s highest performance and highest integration programmable devices quickly to market. Together we will deliver world-class products on TSMC’s 20SoC technology in 2013 and on 16FinFET technology in 2014.”

Xilinx has incorporated its high-end FPGA requirements into the FinFET development process similar to its efforts in the development of 28HPL and 20SoC processes. More collaboration efforts are planned wherein TSMC’s process technology and Xilinx’s UltraScale architecture and next-generation tools will be leveraged.

UltraScale was developed by Xilinx as an ASIC-class architecture that can scale from 20-nanometer planar up to 16-nanometer and beyond FinFET technologies. It also encompasses integrated circuits from monolithic to 3D ICs.

In related news, Synopsys (News - Alert) introduced a starter kit for DesignWare ARC EM processors to enable “out-of-the-box” software development, debugging and system analysis for ARC EM Family of embedded core including four pre-installed FPGA images.

The ARC EM Starter Kit includes a base board and daughter card. The daughter card features a Xilinx Spartan-6 LX45 FPGA, an on-board 125 MHz clock generator, 128 MB of DDR3 memory and 16 MB of flash memory.