As the only 28nm FPGAs fabricated on a high-performance, low-power process (28HPL), 7 series devices offer lower total power consumption and superior performance per watt compared to competing solutions. Architectural and block level innovations unique to Xilinx add to the power advantages at every level. In addition, to ensure a smooth production rollout of your system, 7 series FPGAs provide:
Meeting system power, thermal, and reliability requirements starts with credible power estimation and optimization.
The Xilinx Power Estimator (XPE) provides accurate power estimation, helping designers avoid costly power supply and thermal management changes late in the design cycle. XPE is transparent about all sources of power consumption to ensure a complete picture of the total power budget.
Competing solutions claim “lower power” by not discussing some sources of power consumption. For instance, competitors promote transceiver power based only on the PMA power. Transceiver power is actually the sum of the PMA, PCS, and static power associated with transceiver usage.
The Vivado™ Design Suite offers powerful and accurate power analysis, including:
Vivado offers push button power optimization that reduces dynamic power by an average of 18% and up to 30% with virtually no impact to performance. Fine-grained clock gating technology is automatically applied to reduce switching activity. Other FPGA companies claim to offer similar power optimization, but analysis of these solutions shows either minimal power reduction (default mode) or a major impact to performance (full power optimization mode).
Every 7 series device is tested to published max static power specs to ensure power consumption at or typically below expectations. Competing solutions have repeatedly raised static power specs near orafter production, or simply failed to report maximum static power altogether, forcing designers to re-evaluate system demands.
Xilinx 7 series FPGAs support power binning of devices to provide lower static and total power. Well-defined yield and process distribution models ensure a reliable supply in volume production. Competitors have introduced power binned devices only after standard devices failed to meet the original static power specifications in production, leaving questions around the volume availability of these products.