March 11, 2025
The number of connected devices and sensors deployed at the edge today is growing, and so is the demand for solutions that excel at managing data-intensive tasks, promoting adaptable requirements, integrating advanced processing capabilities, and accelerating time to market.
Designed to enable the aforementioned features is the AMD Spartan™ UltraScale+™ FPGA family for I/O-intensive applications at the edge, such as modern embedded vision, healthcare, industrial networking, robotics, and video applications. The FPGA solution is built using a 16 nm FinFET+ process, features voltage scaling for power and performance tuning, and improved CLB/LUTs, routing, and ASIC-class clocking for high utilization rates.
The Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA in Action
The FPGA solution features densities ranging from 11K to 218K logic cells, and 304 to 572 GPIO pins across the portfolio, with three types of GPIO for different requirements: high-density I/O (HDIO) supports up to 3.3V, high-performance I/O (HPIO) supports up to 1.8V, and XP5IO supports up to 1.5V, enabling speeds of up to 3200 Mb/s (MIPI) and 1800 Mb/s (LVDS).
For advanced vision and sensor compatibility, the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA provides MIPI support with up to 3200 Mb/s for high-speed MIPI and SLVS-EC standards and up to 4-lane MIPI channels for vision applications. The high-performance GTH transceivers enable speeds up to 16.3 Gb/s, in addition to a single oscillator that is designed to simplify clocking by supporting both fabric and SerDes to reduce component count.
For high-speed data transfer, the FPGA solution supports eight PCI Express Gen4 and an integrated DMA IP for simplified interfacing and design complexity. The solution also employs versatile memory options, including on-chip Block RAM for low-latency, high-throughput operations and UltraRAM for large on-chip memory capacities.
The Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA also supports LPDDR4x and LPDDR5 with hardened memory controllers for speeds up to 4266 Mb/s, and DDR4 supported through soft memory controller IP for speeds up to 2400 Mb/s. There is built-in integrated hard IP support for the PCIe Gen4 x8, LPDDR4x/5 memory controllers, and Platform Management Controller for system monitoring and control.
Getting Started with AMD’s Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA
Because security is paramount in modern applications ranging from industrial to embedded vision to healthcare, the FPGA solution leverages advanced security features like post-quantum cryptography (PQC) with NIST-approved algorithms, AES-GCM for secure configuration, and Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) for device uniqueness.
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