Xilinx and TSMC have jointly announced production release of the Virtex-7 HT family, what the pair claims is the industry's first heterogeneous 3D ICs in production.
With this milestone, all Xilinx 28nm 3D IC families are now in volume production. These 28nm devices were developed on TSMC's chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) 3D IC process that produces significant silicon scaling, power and performance benefits by integrating multiple components on a single device, the companies said.
The Xilinx Virtex-7 HT FPGAs feature up to sixteen, 28Gbps and seventy-two, 13.1Gbps transceivers, making them the only single-package solution for high-bandwidth, high-speed Nx100G and 400G line card applications in optical transport networks, the companies noted.
In addition to the Virtex-7 HT FPGAs, two other homogeneous devices in the 3D IC family have been in volume production since early 2013 – Virtex-7 2000T and Virtex-7 X1140T series.
"Working together, we have honed the procedures and technologies to produce the next generation of groundbreaking, CoWoS-based 3D ICs, and are now positioned to leverage TSMC's 20SoC and 16nm FinFET process with our UltraScale architecture to further our industry lead," said Victor Peng, senior VP and GM of Products at Xilinx.
"TSMC continues to push Moore's Law and system integration further with our leading-edge, turnkey CoWoS 3D IC process," said Jack Sun, TSMC VP, R&D and CTO. "We have worked extensively with Xilinx to achieve these results and look forward to additional manufacturing and product breakthroughs in the years ahead as we extend our collaborative efforts."
Xilinx has utilized TSMC's advanced technology CoWoS process to produce high-capacity and high-bandwidth programmable logic devices targeted at the next generation of wired communications, high-performance computing, medical image processing and ASIC prototyping and emulation applications.
