Industry Expert Blogs

The past two weeks were pretty interesting if you follow FPGAs. Yes, Xilinx and Altera kept upping their target to Wall St., but that is not where the excitement came from. It came from the recent announcements of two startups, both created in 2003 and heavily funded. Tabula released its long-awaited device, which goes by the sexy name of “Spacetime”. And Tier Logic left its stealth mode this week to announce its own device, “TierFPGA”.

The dominant factor in classical FPGA architecture is the interconnect: most of the die area is taken by the wires and the interconnect switches and muxes. If you can somehow reduce the area dedicated to interconnect, you can augment the logic density and lessen the cost of the device. Tabula and Tier Logic pitch a 3D architecture to address the interconnect bottleneck, albeit in very different flavors.

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