Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC FPGA Gen 2 Solution
Being introduced this year is a Gen 2 solution. The Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC Gen 2 is targeted at 5G rollouts in Japan and China.
The company says that this product does not have all of the Gen 3 features but it will meet the needs of these 2020 deployments in terms of features and time to market.
Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC FPGA Gen 3 Solution
The company said that the fast follower product, the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC Gen 3 will introduce an extended feature set.
This feature set is what carriers will want in 2021 as they start more aggressively rolling out millimeter wave and additional 5G spectrum deployments.
Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC FPGA Gen 2 and 3 SKU Stack
All of the UltraScale+ products are built on a 16nm process. This process shrink means that the ADCs will use less power than if they were built on 20nm or 28nm which is common. In terms of the actual SKU stack, the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC Gen 2 looks like a very targeted product.
One can see that the remainder of the SKU stack is Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC Gen 3 product. It almost seems like Gen 2 is a specific part that was brought out to increase time to market for some of Xilinx’s customers.
By moving more of the analog conditioning portions into the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC, the company is able to increase its TAM since it is removing components from elsewhere in the system.
If you look at where the families are set to address spectrum, it is fairly clear that the Gen 3 product is designed to simply do more, albeit several quarters later.
Whereas the Gen 1 Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC product has addressed a number of markets, the Gen 2 and Gen 3 products look to extend the scale of the solution.
Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC FPGA Availability
Tee new Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC FPGA Gen 2 product is sampling today and will be in production in June 2019. There was a market that needed product in 2020.
The more feature-rich Gen 3 product is slated for Q3 2020 production. A Xilinx Versal version will follow thereafter.
Final Words
We were hoping to see more Xilinx Versal in 2019, but it seems like the company will be transitioning different product to the new brand over time. That makes sense from a product planning perspective, especially if Xilinx has a market like this where it can offer a 16nm part to replace 20nm and 28nm components.
The key messages are that the new products in the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC line will offer successively better spectrum coverage and more features for 5G operators and other RF applications. With tighter integration, Xilinx hopes to allow these operators to decrease system size and increase flexibility.
Cool /johnoliver