Achronix Semiconductor Announces 1.93 GHz 90nm ''ULTRA'' FPGA Prototype First Silicon Success

Achronix Semiconductor Corporation announced today that it has completed initial testing on the first silicon of its commercial 90nm FPGA prototype. The testing confirmed that the prototype is capable of running common FPGA performance benchmark designs at up to 1.93 GHZ at 1.2V. These results make the Achronix “ULTRA” the fastest CMOS FPGA ever demonstrated. “This is actually a very conservative design,” said Dr. Clinton Kelly, Vice President of Advanced Research at Achronix. “We have already begun work on our 90nm commercial product, and we expect an additional 20% speed increase over this prototype device while keeping our power requirements at a fraction of that required by other FPGAs.” “The hard problems are now solved and the performance of the hardware and software architecture is proven,” said Dr. Rajit Manohar, Chief Technology Officer at Achronix. The Company is now focusing on completing solution features including high speed interfaces, user-selectable speed and power parameters, and support of existing high performance third party FPGA synthesis tools. These enhancements are expected to be completed over the next year and the Company is expecting to release sample quantities of a multi-million gate commercial product in 2007.

Achronix also reported that the prototype device was tested over a wide temperature range from -196C to +130C and over operating voltages from 0.2V to 3.9V and operated correctly under all of these conditions. “While these conditions may be extreme for commercial use, this is a good initial test of the commercial architecture that will be the basis of our Military/Aerospace ‘XTREME’ product family. The ‘XTREME’ family is designed to withstand these types of conditions in the presence of high radiation.” said John Lofton Holt, Chairman and CEO of Achronix.

Achronix Semiconductor is a fabless privately held New York-based Corporation that builds the world's fastest field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs have reconfigurable digital circuits and are ubiquitous in the world of digital electronics. Applications of FPGAs include Digital Signal Processing, communications, aerospace and defense systems, ASIC prototyping, medical imaging, computer vision, speech recognition, cryptography, bioinformatics, computer hardware emulation and a growing range of other areas. They parallel ASICs, and are used to enable short time-to-market, fast debugging of prototypes and field upgrades. In terms of cost and performance, they break even at a lower quantity than an ASIC. The Company’s products are designed to operate with performance and cost characteristics that make the break even much higher and create opportunities for new types of products that require high performance computing but haven’t been able to use FPGAs to date.