Situation
The goals for Xilinx's Virtex-4 FPGA family were challenging and clear: to build embedded, highly parallel DSP elements that would deliver world-class performance while significantly reducing power consumption.
Solution
Arithmatica’s CellMath Services group worked closely with Xilinx's custom IC design group to develop the XtremeDSP™ slice that met their performance specifications as well as their demanding design schedule. The XtremeDSP™ slice incorporates CellMath innovations that increased DSP performance by 50 percent while improving MHz/watt by an amazing 8x over the previous generation design. Arithmatica’s design team provided a completely turnkey, outsourced solution to Xilinx’s custom IC design group.
Results
The Virtex-4 SX55 device delivers 256 billion multiply-and-accumulate per second (MAC/s) processing performance, nearly three times more than any other FPGA. The SX55, with 512 XtremeDSP™ slices, is the highest-performance member of the SX family. All of the available Virtex-4™ FPGA family members include some number of XtremeDSP Slices and each has benefited from the joint design collaboration effort between Xilinx and Arithmatica.
Client Perspective
”Arithmatica helped Xilinx achieve a very aggressive performance goal by increasing the speed of their next-generation DSP operations by more than 50 percent - setting a new industry benchmark. Arithmatica's CellMath IP in conjunction with the new Virtex DSP architecture achieved a remarkable 8x improvement in silicon efficiency, measured in MHz/Watt, over the previous generation.The Arithmatica CellMath Services team worked closely with the Xilinx custom IC design group to meet the world class performance of the Virtex-4 family of FPGAs within the allotted schedule."
Jennifer Wong, Director of IC Design, Xilinx
