Xilinx Introduces World’s Largest FPGA With 35 Billion Transistors

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By Arne Verheyde
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Xilinx today announced the Virtex UltraScale+ VU19P. This 16nm device with 35 billion transistors, consisting of four chips on an interposer, is the world’s largest field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and contains 9 million logic cells.

Aside from the 9 million logic cells, the Virtex VU19P also features 1.5Tb/s of DDR4 memory bandwidth, up to 4.5Tb/s of transceiver bandwidth and over 2,000 user I/Os. Xilinx says the FPGA is 1.6x larger than the 20nm Virtex UltraScale 440, its predecessor and up to now previously the industry’s largest FPGA. That one has 5.5 million logic cells.

Xilinx is targeting ASIC or SoC creators that use FPGAs for emulation, prototyping and validation. That enables developers to begin software integration before the silicon is available. Other applications include test, measurement, compute, networking, aerospace and defense. Xilinx also provides accompanying tool flows and IP to support it.


With 35 billion transistors, it definitely one of the biggest (16nm) chips around. From third-party images, it is clear that the die consist of four rectangular slices (which together span the length of the chip), on top of an interposer. This is similar to the Virtex-7 2000T that the company announced in 2011, of which the VU19P is the third of this kind of ultra big chiplet FPGAs. A very rough estimate yields that the VU19P has a die size of ~900mm2, making it larger than the reticle size limit for monolithic dies.

While no recent disclosures are available, an old comment from Altera (now part of Intel) had Stratix 10 also at 35 billion transistors, but that includes the transceivers which are connected via EMIB to the base die. Intel just announced another big chip on 16nm, the Nervana Spring Crest NNP-T with 28 billion transistors. Although at 688mm2, it is not as big (in die size) as the 21 billion transistor Nvidia V100 that is over 800mm2.

It will be a while until the VU19P is available, as its general launch is planned for the fall of 2020. Xilinx also recently launched a new, small form factor Alveo U50 card for data center acceleration based on its UltraScale+ architecture and started shipping its 7nm Versal ACAP to early customers. 

Arne Verheyde
4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    Thanks for covering this.

    It'd be cool to get any sort of pricing rumors or historical pricing data, on this tier of products. I'd just like to have a rough idea...
    Reply
  • TokyoQuaSar
    bit_user said:
    Thanks for covering this.

    It'd be cool to get any sort of pricing rumors or historical pricing data, on this tier of products. I'd just like to have a rough idea...
    I worked myself on its predecessor, the VU440 for ASIC prototyping. To give you a rough idea, the VU13P which is about half its size (with also slightly superseded blocks) starts at 63000$ a piece on DigiKey : https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/xilinx-inc/XCVU13P-2FLGA2577E/XCVU13P-2FLGA2577E-ND/7604526
    DigiKey is a convenience retailer and of course not the normal mass production route one will use. So depending on the amount produced some big customers can have this price quite reduced. But this is still a lot :)
    Reply
  • bit_user
    TokyoQuaSar said:
    I worked myself on its predecessor, the VU440 for ASIC prototyping. To give you a rough idea, the VU13P which is about half its size (with also slightly superseded blocks) starts at 63000$ a piece on DigiKey : https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/xilinx-inc/XCVU13P-2FLGA2577E/XCVU13P-2FLGA2577E-ND/7604526DigiKey is a convenience retailer and of course not the normal mass production route one will use. So depending on the amount produced some big customers can have this price quite reduced. But this is still a lot :)
    OMG! That's the most expensive chip I've ever heard of! I had to check the link, to see if maybe you got the number of 0's wrong. But the current price is actually $63,733.68!

    Thanks for sharing. Welcome!
    :)
    Reply
  • TokyoQuaSar
    And this is the starting price. With faster speed grade and lots of IOs it can go up to 88K$ https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-fpgas-field-programmable-gate-array/696 (you can sort by price). And Digikey doesn't seem to have the more recent HBM devices, such as the VU37P which could be even more expensive.

    But oddly enough, evaluation boards equipped with those FPGAs and sold by Xilinx themselves are much less expensive, which shows how the price can vary depending on how many you buy and through which route. But eva. board are a kind of "free trial" ("free" is still 10K$...), so even for mass production you might not even be able to get those FPGAs at the price of those boards.
    Reply