Present and Future Developments in Field Programmable Gate Arrays

Jennifer Wong
Director of IC Design
Advanced Product Division
Xilinx
San Jose, CA

Abstract: FPGAs have evolved from logic replacement devices to systems on a chip.  Virtex-II Pro, the newest FPGA family from Xilinx, combines the established Virtex-II logic and memory fabric with two types of dedicated high-performance modules: Multi-Gigabit serial Transceivers (MGTs) and embedded microprocessor

cores, using the PowerPC architecture.  The MGTs combine all the required functionality, like P/S and S/P conversion, 8B-10B encoding and decoding and FIFOs in the transmit and receive paths. Combined with the on-chip microprocessors, the MGTs offer an efficient implementation of many communications protocols. The on-chip PowerPC microprocessors are tightly coupled to the FPGA logic and memory resources, to provide high performance in a wide variety of applications. Finally, present and future trends in FPGA technology and architecture, from 1994 to 2005, are explained.