Intel Altera FINALLY Samples 14nm FPGA parts!

[Daniel Nenni]

Intel "I’m happy to announce Intel has started sampling to customers Stratix® 10 field programmable arrays, the industry’s first 14nm FPGA."

Intel’s Stratix 10 FPGA: Supporting the Smart and Connected Revolution | Intel Newsroom

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Congratulations to the Altera people! It is of course a year late (Xilinx started sampling 16nm in October 2015) and as we all know the first FPGA to a process node gets majority market share. This is a good thing, Altera needs to keep Xilinx innovating, absolutely.

Xilinx of course is skipping 10nm in favor of getting to 7nm early. Altera will have access to 10nm about the same time as TSMC hits 7nm (Q4 2017) so Xilinx again will leap frog Altera. From what I hear in the trenches Altera may not have 10nm parts out until 2019 so Xilinx will have a two year free run with 7nm.

And if you are still unsure about the semiconductor process differences here is a quick refresher from Scott Jones:

The 2016 Leading Edge Semiconductor Landscape

 

[lefty]

And if you are still unsure about the semiconductor process differences here is a quick refresher from Scott Jones:

The 2016 Leading Edge Semiconductor Landscape

I'm just wondering have the metal and poly pitches of 10nm been actually published by the foundries, or are those just guesses?

 

[Daniel Nenni]

I'm just wondering have the metal and poly pitches of 10nm been actually published by the foundries, or are those just guesses?

Yes they have, in conference papers and presentations. Scott's day job is process cost models so this is what he does. And after we publish them on SemiWiki sometimes we get corrections so those numbers are solid.

 

[dwisehart]

Wow, what a long road. Congrats to the Altera people! They started shipping the Stratix V FPGA in 2010. Then they inked the deal with Intel back in early 2013 and talked about the Stratix 10. At the time it looked like Xilinx--with their 28 nm Virtex-7 parts--was in trouble.

It was just early this year Xilinx started shipping 16 nm UltraScale FPGAs to customers. Very early word is that TSMC may give them 7 nm parts next year. It is going to be interesting to see how this plays and which parts customers will buy more of.

 

[JardCrocker]

Hi...Intel were a second source for Altera's EP6xx PLDs.ISTR these were really nice devices in their day, as they had lots of macrocells, and they were less tightly dedicated to pins than the 22V10s etc.of the day. so you could have buried logic. I think they also had a T-type flipflop mod which was handy for big counters .

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