New 28nm platforms: Transforming Asia from world's factory to global R&D hub

With almost 4 billion people, Asia is home to 60 percent of the world's population. In today's global electronics market place, it has not only become a key driver of consumer demand but is rapidly transforming from the "world's factory" into a global hub for R&D, high-end manufacturing and services.

Given that the middle class in China and India is expected to almost triple in size to more than 1.2 billion by 2030 (Source: World Bank), it's safe to assume that this trend will continue as Asia's population becomes more urbanized, educated—and connected.

In 2012 and beyond, new 28nm programmable platforms hold the promise of accelerating Asia's transformation, serving as a centerpiece for engineering innovation and differentiation for domestic and multinational companies to meet both local and global demand for electronic products. Several long-term trends are driving the need for leapfrogging technologies to catapult Asia's participation in the global electronics industry:

???Insatiable bandwidth demand in broadening markets
???Ubiquitous connected computing for everyone, everywhere
???The programmable imperative trend toward broad adoption of flexible reprogrammable devices, with minimal up-front NRE costs and lower risk, over costly, full custom application-specific devices

These trends present tough engineering challenges. How can you double the bandwidth of existing systems without an increase in power, form factor or cost—and deliver a differentiated product ahead of the competition? The answer lies in combining chip-level integration and programmability, which we at Xilinx Inc. call "programmable systems integration."

Last year, 2011, marked a major milestone for Xilinx. We reaped the benefits of several major, multiyear engineering programs to deliver unprecedented levels of system integration in a new class of 28nm platforms that enable design engineers to build better systems with fewer chips—faster.

Xilinx is among a group of semiconductor industry leaders investing hundreds of millions of dollars to ride the leading edge of the world's most advanced chip-making technology, leverage the advantages of emerging 3D packaging, and create new classes of devices that combine functions never before available in a single component.

By integrating millions of logic cells, processors, DSPs and mixed-signal functions into a single component we help our customers avoid board-level interconnect delays—thereby improving performance, taking up less board space, consuming less power and reducing BOM costs when compared with multiple devices. Moreover, the inherent flexibility of our programmable platforms enable designers to easily change or upgrade product features to meet new market requirements, adapt to changing industry standards and differentiate their products.