14 DAY TRIAL // Being one of the most important special purpose system-on-chip solution manufacturers in the world, Xilinx has announced the launch of its first shipment of Zynq UltraScale+ processing solution.
Built on TSMC's second-generation 16nm FinFET process technology (CLN16FF+), the chip promises to deliver increased performance and lowered power consumption. According to Electronics Weekly,the new MPSoC is integrating four ARM Cortex-A53 general-purpose cores, two ARM Cortex-R5 real-time processing units, and an ARM Mali-400 graphics processor, the new Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ is basically an all-programmable multi-processor system-on-chip. It includes integrated peripherals, safety and security engine, and advanced power management.
Thanks to TSMC's 16nm FinFET+ fabrication process, Xilinx managed to improve its complexity and performance while maintaining a low power consumption as well. However, the surprising part is that Zynq UltraScale+ chips were shipped to an unknown customer about a quarter ahead of the schedule. Apparently, the models were the very first chips A0 received straight from the fab after being checked that they are fully-functional.
Xilinx and TSMC prove the maturity of FinFETs 16nm+
At TSMC, 16nm FinFETs usually take 90 days before that are good for shipping. The fact that these chips arrived earlier shows the maturity of TSMC in building the 16nm FinFET+, which in turn could be very good publicity for convincing AMD to switch from GlobalFoundries to TSMC. What's interesting is that if Xilinx places an order for another batch at TSMC now, the chips will be ready probably in the first few months of 2016.
Xilinx SoCs are used for a wide variety of applications that include advanced driver assistance systems, computerized vision systems, surveillance applications and even 5G base stations, so basically it's used in a lot of industrial stuff. The new Zynq UltraScale+ will be able to process and analyze data as well as make decisions and initiate actuator commands thanks mainly to the highly-parallel graphics processing cores of the MPSoC.
“We call this a ‘Three-Peat,’” says Xilinx Vice-President Victor Peng. “Being first to market with products at 28nm, 20nm, and now at 16nm,” Xilinx probably has some top notch engineers under their pay.