ACHRONIX FPGA: ULTIMATE PRODUCT GUIDE

Achronix FPGA has gained so much steam in the FPGA semiconductor industry. During the product innovation award held on April 2022, Achronix semiconductor corporation was recognized by Frost and Sullivan for its outstanding achievement in developing FPGAs with superior performance in ACE design tools and compute acceleration. This article focuses on the following Achronix products;

• About Achronix FPGAs
• Achronix Speedster7t.
• The Achronix Speedcore Embedded FPGA IP.
• Achronix VectorPath Accelerator Card.
• Achronix Tool Suite.

ABOUT ACHRONIC FPGAs

Achronix Semiconductor was founded in Ithaca, Newyork but moved to silicon valley in 2006. It metamorphosed into a fabless semiconductor corporation based in Santa Clara, California.

The company has essential people, Robert Blake, Mark Voll, and Virantha Ekanayake, as its C.E.O and C.T.O, respectively. Achronix fabless Semiconductor offers innovation in high-end FPGA-based data acceleration solutions, compute-intensive, high performance, and real-time processing applications. The company has also become a major player in technological innovation.

ACHRONIX SPEEDSTER7T

Achronix disrupted the artificial intelligence chip market by introducing the Achronix speedster7t FPGA. It quickly became designers’ choice in the market because of the following features;

• High-Speed Interfaces
  • It has up to 8 controllers.
  • It has 400G ethernet.
  • It has an enhanced 4TBPs bandwidth.
  • Optimized 112 GBPs SerDes (up to 64)
  • Possess a powerful GDDR6 memory.
• Machine Learning Processors
  • Possess optimized speed up to 750MHz with co-located block RAM.
  • Fully fracturable integer multiplier/accumulator.
  • It has native support for integer, floating-point, block floating-point, and Bfloat16.
• 2D Network On Chip (2D NOC)
  • It Provides a more simplified FPGA design.
  • Less routing congestions compared to other FPGAs.
  • It Supports 20TBs bandwidth.
  • It Supports high-performing internal functional blocks, FPGA fabric, i/o memory, and interconnects.

ACHRONIX SPEEDSTER7T TARGET APPLICATIONS

• Suitable for compute acceleration
• Networking.
• 5G infrastructure.
• Computational storage.
• Test and measurement.
• They are used for Artificial intelligence and machine learning.

THE ACHRONIX SPEEDCORE EMBEDDED FPGA IP

To improve overall system performance, Achronix semiconductor designed the speedcore eFPGA IP in the distribution in 2016. The essence of the speedcore embedded (eFPGA) IP is to provide flexibility and support for artificial intelligence while providing improved functionality. The speedcore eFPGA IP has the following advantages;

• Allows integration of eFPGA functions into ASICs and SOCs.
• Allows customers to specify their logic, RAM, and DSP blocks.
• It has speedcore look-up tables (LUTs), RAM blocks, and DSP64 blocks assembled like Lego blocks to provide space for optimum function.
• Also, the speedcore IP comes with a personalized version of ACE design tools for programming the speedcore eFPGA IP.

Achronix VectorPath Accelerator Card.

The Achronix vector path S7t-VG6 accelerator card is designed with a 7nm speed which targets high-performance compute and data acceleration applications. It is also intended to reduce time to market and optimize performance for artificial intelligence, machine learning, networking, and data center applications. The vector path s7t-vg6 features the speedster 7t AC7t1500 with the following capabilities;

• AC7t1500 FPGA Device Features
  • It has a 2-dimensional NOC capable of more than 27 TBs.
  • It Has up to 4 Tbps of GDDR6 bandwidth.
  • It is built on TSMC’s 7nm FinFET process.
  • Possess about 2,560 MLP blocks capable of 41K Int8 operations per cycle.
  • Built with ResNet-50 benchmark: 8,600 images per second.
  • Has up to 692K 6-input LUTs (1,522K 4-input LUT equivalents).
• AC7t1500 System Interface
  • It has enhanced flash memory for booting FPGA.
  • Possess one QSFP56 cage – 1x 200GbE, 2x 100GbE or 4×10/25/40/50 GbE.
  • It Carries a host interface – x16 PCIe Gen4 interface directly to FPGA.
  • It possesses a GDDR6 – 16 GB, 8 banks with two independent 16-bit channels per bank.
  • MCIO – connected to FPGA via four transceivers supporting PCIe Gen5 data rates.
• Target Applications
  The Achronix S7t VG6 is suitable for vector accelerator card solutions used in the following applications;
  • Networking applications
    • Load balancing
    • Network monitoring
    • Virtual machines
    • Load balancing
    • DPI
  • Storage applications
    • Deduplication
    • Compression
    • Erasure coding
    • Search
  • Sensor processing
    • Medical imaging
    • Oil exploration
    • Weather forecasting
    • Data recorders
    • RADAR.
  • Compute Intensive applications
    • Image recognition
    • Voice recognition/search.
    • Recommendation engines.
    • High-frequency trading.
    • Genomics.

Achronix Tool Suite

The Achronix tool suite is software designed to work with industry-standard synthesis tools. In addition, the software allows embedded and stand-alone FPGA designers to integrate their designs into Achronix FPGAs technology.

The Achronix design tools cater to strategic product development and implementation of speedstar7t FPGAs and speedcore eFPGA IP in the following ways;

• The Achronix tool suite supports both pre and post-routing timing simulation.
• Supports full scripting support using Tcl.
• Allows performance of timing analysis to determine FMAX and critical paths.
• It supports an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) with an advanced physical view for placement and viewing critical paths.
• It Provides all back-end place-and-route functions.

SUPPORT FEATURES AND CAPABILITIES OF THE ACHRONIX TOOL SUIT

• Supports better IP configuration, i.e., it creates and edits IP, including the I/O designer toolkit used to configure Speedster7t intricate IP functions.
• It supports a multi-process view, i.e., it allows running multiple flows in parallel to explore various optimizations for a single design.
• Supports an improved floor planner, i.e., it views and edits placement and routing.

ADVANCED FUNCTIONALITIES

Apart from the industries standard tools such as bitstream generation and place-and-route, the Achronix tool suite comes with the following advanced functions;

• Advance floor planning tools that support the complex hard IP found in the I/O ring of speedster7t FPGA with the I/O designer Toolkit.
• It Supports Static (sign-off) timing analysis.
• Support for the Speedster Cryptographic Engine found in the Speedster AC7t1550.

SYNTHESIS INCLUDED

An Achronix-optimised version of synplify pro from synopsis is provided in the achronix tool. This version of synplify supports the production of high-performance and cost-effective FPGA solutions. In addition, it is a single, easy-to-use interface that can perform continuous incremental synthesis and HDL code analysis that is intuitive.

ACCESS TO DEBUG

The Achronix tool suite provides snapshots of debugging solutions in real-time. In addition, the debugger is embedded in the ACE to deliver a platform that observes the user’s design signals in real-time.

CONCLUSION

The Achronix field programable gate array has provided better services to its customers, investors, and partners alike in the industry. However, the company still retains its top spot in providing compute-intensive, high-performance, and real-time processing applications.