Technology issues facing the world´s largest integrated circuits

Summary form only given. FPGAs are amongst the world´s largest and most complex integrated circuits, and they continue to be very early adopters of the latest process technology. This talk will describe some of the driving applications and technology trends pushing FPGAs to 28 nm and smaller process nodes. We will also highlight how FPGA architecture is evolving, as exemplified by Altera´s Stratix V FPGAs. Power management and silicon efficiency issues are pushing FPGAs to become somewhat more application-targeted, and to incorporate larger amounts of hard logic that makes them more complete systems-on-achip. In addition, the very high I/O bandwidth requirements of next-generation systems are driving innovation in both high-speed memory interface design and high-speed serial transceiver design. Stratix V supports partial reconfiguration to increase silicon efficiency by swapping in different functionality over time. We will describe both the hardware that enables partial reconfiguration, and the software tools that will enable efficient design without becoming entangled in low-level physical details. Finally, we will discuss both software challenges and promising research efforts to create CAD tools that will help designers productively create the very large systems enabled by modern FPGAs.