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by chriscool 3669 days ago
> Also ,recent industrial chips are using 28nm, and going beyond that is extremely expensive

Yeah, so ASICs that are not produced in big enough volume will not move to 14nm or less. This means that FPGA that can move to 14nm or less, because of bigger volume, may become competitive against those ASICs.

1 comments

When i'm saying "industrial chips are at 28nm" i mean industrial FPGA's.

Will xilinx create industrial FPGA's at 14nm or beyond ?

First transistor cost will have to become meaningfully lower than 28nm transistor costs. That only happens at 10nm. But at that node, NRE costs are extremely expensive. Spread over low-cost low-end industrial chips - this requires a huge volume, which xilinx probably doesn't have yet.

Also couple that with 28nm being more much reliable(all the failure mechanisms increase at 10nm: electron migration from wires, thermal hot sports, transistor fin self heating), and since reliability is key for industrial - it would be hard to see industrial moving beyond 28nm.