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As anyone that has prototyped in the past will attest, making a design run at very high speed is a significant task in itself, so we must be able to rely on our boards working to full specification every time. If boards delivered by a vendor show noticeable difference in performance or delay between batches, or even between boards in the same batch, then this is a sign that the board design is not of high quality.
For example, for an interface to run at speeds over 100MHz, required for native operation of interfaces such as PCIe or DDR3, the interface must have fast pins on its FPGAs and robust design and layout of the PCB itself. To do this right, particularly with the latest, high pin-count FPGAs, requires complex board designs with very many layers. Very few board vendors can design and build 40-layer boards for example. The board traces themselves must be length and impedance matched to allow good differential signaling and good delay matching between remote synchronous points. This will allow more freedom when partitioning any given design across multiple FPGAs.
This need for high-quality reproducible board performance is especially true of clock and reset networks, which must not only be flexible enough to allow a wide variety of clock sources and rates, they must also deliver good clock signal at every point in a distributed clock network.
Power supply is also a critical part of the design, and low impedance, high-current paths to the primary FPGA core and IO voltage rail pins are fundamental to maintaining low noise, especially on designs which switch many signals between FPGAs on every clock cycle.
On first inspection, two boards that use the same FPGAs might seem to offer approximately the same speed and quality but it is the expertise of the board vendor that harnesses the raw FPGA performance and delivers it reliably. For example, even device temperature must be monitored and controlled in order to maintain reliability and achieve highest performance possible within limits of the board fabric. Let us look at another aspect of performance, that of trading off interconnect width versus speed using multiplexing.
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: Embedded - CPLDs (Complex Programmable Logic Devices)
Lifecycle:Active Active
RoHS: No RoHS
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: Embedded - CPLDs (Complex Programmable Logic Devices)
Lifecycle:Active Active
RoHS: No RoHS
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array)
Lifecycle:Active Active
RoHS:
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories:
Lifecycle:Obsolete -
RoHS: No RoHS
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories:
Lifecycle:Obsolete -
RoHS:
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