This article was originally published on May 26, 2020.
Editor’s Note: This content is contributed by Gabe Dominguez, Technical Sales Engineer for Aerospace & Defense.
Just a week ago, Xilinx announced the arrival of Radiation Tolerant (RT) Kintex UltraScale (XQRKU060), our newest addition to the Space-Grade (XQR) portfolio. The new device enables a broader array of functionality and delivers a significant increase in performance compared to our previous generations and other FPGA vendors. By adding an UltraScale device, we are skipping three process nodes from 65nm to 20nm. The product table below shows how RT Kintex® UltraScale™ stacks up to our previous XQR devices, Virtex®-4QV (V4QV) and Virtex-5QV (V5QV).
Today, satellites are expected to perform on-board processing (OBP) with a capability of extensive on-orbit reconfiguration. To meet these standards, we developed a rad-tolerant FPGA with an increase of 10X in programmable logic, 10X in digital signal processing (DSP), and 5X in transceivers (MGTs) over V5QV. Additionally, the new device has a reduced footprint with robust ceramic column grid array (CCGA) packaging. XQRKU060 effectively combines four V5QV FPGAs into a singular, smaller chip.
RT Kintex UltraScale FPGA brings with it a platform that enables all developers in the space industry. The new platform allows our space customers to develop their designs on our ASIC-class Vivado® Design Suite and revolutionary Vitis™ Unified Software Platform. Space engineers can easily add in a Microblaze™ Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) to their systems for high reliability embedded processing. Furthermore, they will now be able use to Vitis AI to develop machine learning applications for high-performance neural network acceleration. We are bringing machine learning to space!
It’s been 10 years since we’ve announced a space-grade device, so we are excited about the new addition of RT Kintex UltraScale FPGA. We will begin shipping in September, so stop by the RT Kintex UltraScale product page at www.xilinx.com/rt-kintex-ultrascale and download the white paper to learn how you can start developing today. You can also visit the space lounge for detailed information.