For a long time, most of the market share of FPGAs has been dominated by two companies, Xilinx and Intel (acquisition of Altera). Although there are other vendors offering FPGA devices, no company in the world, especially high-end FPGAs, can challenge Xilinx and Intel.
Achronix is a provider of FPGA technology and products. Since its inception in 2004, they have focused on the FPGA field and have many innovative technologies and products. In 2013, Achronix introduced the Speedster 22i, a high-end stand-alone FPGA device based on Intel's most advanced 22nm process. In 2016, Achronix introduced an innovative eFPGA, embedded FPGA technology. eFPGA is mainly for the SoC design company authorized IP, allowing customers to embed FPGA units in their own chips. At the end of last year, Achronix upgraded its eFPGA products to introduce eFPGA Gen4 (fourth generation eFPGA IP) with higher performance, lower power consumption and lower cost.
Now, Achronix is continuing to make an impact on the high-end independent FPGA field. Recently, the company announced a high-end FPGA family, the Speedster7t, which uses a variety of advanced design ideas and semiconductor processes for high-speed machine learning and data acceleration applications.
The Speedster7t family is built on TSMC's 7nm FinFET process and delivers high-end design in three parts: efficient computing power, efficient and high-bandwidth data transfer, and efficient and efficient storage caching.
In terms of computing power, Speedster7t changes the traditional FPGA topology, but places the machine learning processor (MLP) at the core of the computing unit for maximum computing performance and maximum energy efficiency. Speedster7t's MLP uses mathematical function blocks optimized for artificial intelligence and machine learning. In terms of internal communication, the Speedster7t uses NOC (Network on Chip) technology to achieve high-bandwidth connections between various units, such as PCIe to memory and high-speed interconnection between logic blocks, eliminating traditional FPGA layout limitation. In terms of Ethernet interface, Speedster7t adopts multi-channel layout, achieving a large bandwidth of 400G, breaking the bandwidth bottleneck of traditional FPGA.
Currently, Achronix has announced four products in the Speedster7t series, namely 7t750, 7t500, 7t3000 and 7t6000. The first devices and boards for evaluation will be available in the fourth quarter of 2019.
For more information on this range of products, please refer to the Achronix website: https://www.achronix.com/product/speedster7t
