Derek Curd
Xilinx

With the introduction of the Virtex-5 family, Xilinx is once again leading the charge to deliver new technologies and capabilities to FPGA consumers. The move to 65 nm FPGAs promises to deliver many of the benefits traditionally associated with smaller process geometries: lower cost, higher performance, and greater logic capacity. However, along with these benefits, the 65 nm process node brings with it new challenges. This white paper addresses one of those challenges, power consumption in 65 nm FPGAs. As with the Virtex-4 family, Xilinx has implemented a number of process and architectural innovations in Virtex-5 devices to ensure that static power consumption is minimized and that the dynamic power benefits of moving to a new process node are fully realized.