Power Efficiency

Through careful selection of silicon process and power-conscious architecture design, Xilinx devices deliver power efficiency across all product portfolios, including Spartan-6, 7 series, UltraScale™, and UltraScale+™ FPGAs, and SoCs. With each generation, Xilinx broadens its power reduction capabilities, ranging from process enhancements, architectural innovations, aggressive voltage scaling strategies, and advanced software optimization strategies. More detail on portfolio-specific capabilities, silicon process advantages, and benchmark comparisons are shown below. Power estimation, thermal models, full software support, and demonstration boards are publically available for all families.

Based on a high performance, low-power semiconductor process (TSMC 16nm FinFET+), the UltraScale+ device families delivers up to 60% overall device-level power savings over 7 series FPGAs and SoCs. Architectural enhancements include:

• Hardware-based clock gating
• Hardened BRAM cascading
• DSP block efficiencies
• Power-optimized transceivers

Through architectural innovation and a dual-voltage operation of the primary core fabric, UltraScale+ families more than double the performance-per watt-capabilities of 7 series families by realizing power reductions while improving overall performance.

In addition to all the power reducing capabilities of UltraScale+ FPGA logic, Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoCs utilize multiple power islands and domains within the processing system for coarse-grain and fine-grain dynamic power gating to continually adjust power consumption to performance demands, lowering overall device power.

Based on a low-power 20nm semiconductor process coupled with significant static and power gating, UltraScale FPGA families deliver up to 40% overall device-level power savings compared to 7 series FPGAs. Architectural enhancements shared with UltraScale+ devices include

• Hardware-based clock gating
• Hardened BRAM cascading
• DSP block efficiencies
• Power-optimized transceivers

As the only 28nm FPGAs and SoCs fabricated on a high-performance, low-power process (28HPL), 7 series devices offer up to 50% total power reduction over previous generation families and superior performance per watt compared to competing 28nm solutions. Architectural and block-level innovations include:

• Dynamic Function eXchange for static power savings
• Multi-mode I/O control
• Intelligent clock gating
• Power binning and voltage scaling

View competitive benchmark summaries as well as detailed benchmark process.