Intel 7nm FPGA will take full advantage of Foveros 3D stacking technology. Intel has three new components in its advanced chip manufacturing: EMIB, Foveros, and ODI. On Architecture Day 2020, it was revealed that Intel’s next-generation FPGA products based on Intel’s future 7nm manufacturing process will integrate the current generation EMIB and the 3D Foveros stack.
Intel 7nm FPGA will use the 3D Foveros stack
EMIB, or Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge, is essentially a piece of silicon embedded in a PCB substrate, which allows a piece of silicon to be connected to it in a very dense manner. Two bits of silicon can be connected to a single EMIB, providing a fast, low-power, point-to-point connection.
We’ve seen EMIBs on chips like Kaby Lake-G, Stratix 10 GX 10M FPGAs and for upcoming Intel Xe graphics like Ponte Vecchio and Xe-HP. Intel has also released a royalty-free version of EMIB called AIB.
Foveros is Intel’s “3D” stacking technology that allows two silicon bits to be stacked on top of each other, again in a high-bandwidth, low-power implementation. Foveros is currently used in Intel’s Lakefield processor and has been announced for future products such as Ponte Vecchio. Now we need to add another one to this list: FPGAs.
Technically, Intel refers to any product with EMIB and Foveros as a ‘co-emib’ product, and this falls under this designation. One of the new elements to which the 7nm FPGAs will have access is a new 224G PAM4 transceiver module that Intel is currently adapting and validating.
It’s not clear exactly when these new Intel 7nm FPGAs will come to market, and Intel’s own slides show a roadmap where the current 10nm Agilex FPGAs are the main products for 2021/2022, so 2023 may be the year for this new proposal from the silicon giant.