Xilinx announces new Spartan-7 line

[marshallh]

http://press.xilinx.com/2015-11-19-Xilinx-Announces-the-Spartan-7-FPGA-Family

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 19, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX) today announced the Spartan®-7 FPGA family that will deliver I/O intensive devices for cost-sensitive applications. The new family will address connectivity requirements across a breadth of markets including automotive, consumer, industrial IoT, data center, wired and wireless communications, and portable medical solutions. All new Spartan-7 FPGAs will be supported on the no-cost Vivado® Design Suite WebPACK™ Edition, as well as the Vivado Design and System Editions, to enable fastest time to integration and implementation.

The Spartan-7 FPGA family will deliver high I/O ratios in small form factor packages, critical for cost-sensitive markets. The family will provide up to 4X price-performance-per-watt improvement over previous generations for flexible connectivity, interface bridging, and companion chip functionality.

"Xilinx has a long history of providing cost optimized solutions with our Spartan class of products," says Kirk Saban, Senior Director of FPGA & SoC Product Management and Marketing at Xilinx. "The introduction of the Spartan-7 FPGA family re-affirms our continued commitment to that heritage and extends our multi-generational leadership in I/O density, small form factor packaging, and power efficiency."

The new family will be co-optimized with the industry-leading Vivado Design Suite to deliver an IP-centric and system-centric development environment to address short development cycle requirements and aggressive time-to-market pressures common in cost-conscious markets. The Spartan-7 FPGA family will extend the existing Xilinx 7 Series portfolio, implemented in TSMC's 28nm HPL process.

About Xilinx

Xilinx is the leading provider of All Programmable FPGAs, SoCs, MPSoCs, and 3D ICs. Xilinx uniquely enables applications that are both software defined and hardware optimized – powering industry advancements in Cloud Computing, SDN/NFV, Video/Vision, Industrial IoT, and 5G Wireless. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com                                                   

[KE5FX]

The Spartan-7 FPGA family will deliver high I/O ratios in small form factor packages, critical for cost-sensitive markets. The family will provide up to 4X price-performance-per-watt improvement over previous generations for flexible connectivity, interface bridging, and companion chip functionality.

Interesting, everything they're saying about Spartan-7 was previously said about Artix.  Are they just renaming Artix, or do they really have four separate 7-series product lines now?

An Artix device with the more flexible I/O voltage support of the Spartan-6 parts would be welcome.

[Kjelt]

I always wonder what some marketeers think that an IoT device is.
Most IoT devices can not handle full ip stacks and need to be dirt cheap, think of bom around $5 to $10 , weird if the fpga iself costs more than that 

[daqq]

Anything new with solderable packages? (TQFP and similar?) Or is it all BGA with absurdly high technology requirements?

[Bassman59]

Anything new with solderable packages? (TQFP and similar?) Or is it all BGA with absurdly high technology requirements?

No data anywhere on the Xilinx web site. Only the press release.

Hopefully they will have non-BGA packages. I wonder if they think they need to target the small FPGA market that Lattice seems to own. Something smaller than a Spartan 3AN-50 is welcome, especially when you can bolt it onto an external memory interface on your favorite low-cost ARM.

[marshallh]

I would be surprised if there was more than just 144-qfp. Likely there will be mostly 0.8mm around 256-300 balls with finer CSP options.
Making piddly small QFP packages just doesn't make sense when the die is too big to fit.

[autobot]

Nice , they're offering their high level synthesis tools for free for this chip.

[Bassman59]

Nice , they're offering their high level synthesis tools for free for this chip.

They're calling it a Spartan 7, so my guess is that they've decided to simplify Artix 7 in some fashion (removing certain high-end features, and certainly not offering gigabit transceivers), but the fabric and routing are the same (that's the selling point of the whole 7 series, much of the features are the same). So supporting it in Vivado would seem to be straightforward.

Also, ISE is dead, so of course the new chip needs to be supported in Vivado.

[that_guy]

Anything new with solderable packages? (TQFP and similar?) Or is it all BGA with absurdly high technology requirements?

We can hope, but the bit in the release that says "...will deliver high I/O ratios in small form factor packages" does not look great for the hobbyist.

[KE5FX]

Anything new with solderable packages? (TQFP and similar?) Or is it all BGA with absurdly high technology requirements?

We can hope, but the bit in the release that says "...will deliver high I/O ratios in small form factor packages" does not look great for the hobbyist.

You just need to readjust your worldview.  Think of the package as a die, and think of an integration board as the part.   Xess, ZTEX, Opal Kelly, and numerous other vendors offer "parts" that incorporate most of the common "dies."

The QFP-versus-QFN/BGA battle is lost, so don't fight it.

[photon]

Nice , they're offering their high level synthesis tools for free for this chip.

Their motivation is to have the users debug Vivado. It needs it.

[mark03]

Does anyone know the actual die size in, say, Artix-7 devices?  And is it always the same die for every device in the family?

[Rasz]

certainly not offering gigabit transceivers

well, in that case they can F off
its 2015, even cheap fpgas should be able to deal with fullhd video

[marshallh]

Does anyone know the actual die size in, say, Artix-7 devices?  And is it always the same die for every device in the family?

All 50T and smaller devices (15T, 35T) are the same die, and 75T/100T are the same. They are presumably binned as such.

[Bassman59]

certainly not offering gigabit transceivers

well, in that case they can F off
its 2015, even cheap fpgas should be able to deal with fullhd video

oh, I wouldn't mind if they had a part in the family with gigabit transceivers, but I think that for the majority of designs which could use a small FPGA, the transceiver adds too much cost for no benefit. Not everything needs HD video

[JoeN]

I wonder if they will somehow make the part work with JESD204 without requiring thousands of dollars of add-on "IP".    It would be interesting to try out some of these newfangled parts.

[tggzzz]

There are a number of possible objectives and means for them to achieve the objectives.

If they want to "strongly dissuade" people from using ISE for new designs, then they might have Spartan 3/6 equivalent devices in a 7 fabric.

If people want small cheap devices with Spartan 6 level logic complexity plus high speed i/o, and are "forced" to used other manufacturers devices, then Xilinx might simply be making Spartan-size devices with 7 series fabric and i/o blocks.

No doubt Xilinx will let us know when it suits them

[nctnico]

Also, ISE is dead, so of course the new chip needs to be supported in Vivado.

I wouldn't say that so quickly. Vivado still lacks several synthesis features like being able to preload block rams properly from VHDL. One of the (open hardware) projects I work on every now and then uses that but it can't be synthesised with Vivado yet.

[KE5FX]

Ah, Vivado.  The iTunes of FPGA tools.

[hamster_nz]

Also, ISE is dead, so of course the new chip needs to be supported in Vivado.

I wouldn't say that so quickly. Vivado still lacks several synthesis features like being able to preload block rams properly from VHDL. One of the (open hardware) projects I work on every now and then uses that but it can't be synthesised with Vivado yet.

Interesting....

I have a few projects that do just this, and they seem fine - either inferred blocks or setting the content by using INIT attributes with primitives.

Do you have an AR # or a link, so it can't catch me out....

[ElektroQuark]

No updates in XILINXs web about the SPARTAN 7.
Anyone with inside information about releases or form factors?

[Someone]

No updates in XILINXs web about the SPARTAN 7.
Anyone with inside information about releases or form factors?

Xilinx have been talking about the Artix 7 parts since at least 2012 (http://press.xilinx.com/2012-07-17-Xilinx-Ships-First-Artix-7-FPGAs-Raising-the-Performance-Bar-for-Portable-and-Small-Form-Factor-Applications-at-the-Edge), still not in wide distribution and not at all what was originally described. So its anyones guess when Spartan 7 parts might arrive.

[ElektroQuark]

So no news...

Thank you!

[alexxk]

With the sale of the Spartan 6 development boards I have some hope that they will announce Spartan 7 soon

[EEVblog]

I can remember using beta silicon for the Spartan (1)