Industry Expert Blogs

Recently, Achronix announced that it was shipping its first FPGA product using 22nm technology from Intel. Several articles have been published already on this story (see this column on EE Times, for example), so I'll try not to repeat what's already been said.

First, let's set the scene. The company was founded in 2004. The original Speedster products from Achronix promised to be highly differentiated when they were announced in 2008 because they featured a radically different architecture. They were based on a 65nm TSMC process, but have since been withdrawn from its web. So let's look at the technology and possible reasons why Achronix switched to 22nm Tri-Gate (Intel's version of FinFET) technology.

From a technological point of view, the original products used asynchronous logic, with handshakes between stages, to perform combinatorial functions as fast as possible. This handshaking is termed picoPIPE by the company.