Designed for High-Bandwidth Workloads in Applications including AI/ML, 5G infrastructure, Networking, Computation Storage, Test and Measurement
Achronix Semiconductor Corporation, a leader in high-performance FPGAs and embedded FPGA (eFPGA) IP, today announced that it has begun shipping its 7nm Speedster®7t AC7t1500 FPGAs to customers ahead of schedule. The Speedster7t family is purpose-built for high bandwidth workloads in a broad range of applications including AI/ML, 5G infrastructure, networking, computational storage, test and measurement, where Speedster7t FPGAs eliminate critical performance bottlenecks associated with traditional FPGAs.
The Speedster7t FPGA family is built on TSMC’s 7nm process technology and delivers the industry’s highest performance for networking, storage and compute acceleration. “Achronix’s Speedster7t FPGAs provide customers the highest bandwidth FPGAs available today and include innovative architectural features which make them ideal for data acceleration applications,” said Robert Blake, CEO of Achronix.
“I am exceptionally proud of what the Achronix team has accomplished. The hardware validation of the first devices is progressing ahead of schedule with devices operating as expected, which has enabled us to accelerate time-to-market from months to weeks thanks to TSMC, our foundry partner’s leading-edge process technology and manufacturing expertise.”
The AC7t1500 has been optimized for high bandwidth applications and includes the industry’s first 2D network-on-chip (NoC) with more than 20 Tbps of bi-directional bandwidth, 112 Gbps SerDes, PCIe Gen5, 400G Ethernet and 4 Tbps external memory bandwidth with its GDDR6 memory interfaces. These devices also include an array of the new innovative machine learning processors (MLPs) which are ideally suited for the diverse and high performance workloads required in AI/ML applications. The Speedster7t FPGAs are supported by the Achronix tool suite which includes Synplify Pro synthesis and the ACE place,route, and timing tools. These industry proven design tools are available today for customers to evaluate and design for Speedster7t FPGAs.
One of the major architectural innovations in Speedster7t FPGAs is the industry’s first 2D NoC. The 2D NoC has dedicated high-bandwidth paths across the entire FPGA fabric interconnecting all functional blocks and peripheral I/O to each other and to the FPGA fabric. The 2D NoC eliminates complex routing bottlenecks found in traditional FPGAs and can transmit or receive 512Gbps at each of the 80 nodes across the FPGA yielding greater than 20Tbps of bidirectional bandwidth. This structure simplifies routing and accelerates timing closure, allowing designers to use the available logic and memory resources to create differentiation in their designs.
General Availability
Engineering samples of the AC7t1500 FPGAs are shipping to customers today. Achronix expects to complete full device validation of the FPGA fabric, hard IP and peripheral interfaces in the second half of 2021 and will begin shipping production devices by the end of 2021.
In January 2021, Achronix entered into a definitive merger agreement with ACE Convergence Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: ACEV) in a transaction that would result in Achronix being listed on Nasdaq. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2021.
