Architectural enhancements in Intel® Agilex™ FPGAs

Abstract

This paper describes architectural enhancements in Intel® Agilex™ FPGAs and SoCs. Agilex devices are built on Intel's 10nm process and feature next-generation programmable fabric, tightly coupled with a quad-core ARM processor subsystem, a secure device manager, IO and memory interfaces, and multiple companion transceiver tile choices. The Agilex fabric features multiple logic block enhancements that significantly improve propagation delays and integrate more effectively with the second-generation HyperFlex™ pipelined routing architecture. Routing connections are re-designed to be point-to-point, dropping intermediate connections featured in prior FPGA generations and replacing them with a wider variety of shorter wire types. Fine-grain programmable clock skew and time-borrowing were introduced throughout the fabric to augment the slack-balancing capabilities of HyperFlex registers. DSP capabilities are also extended to natively support new INT9/BFLOAT16/FP16 formats. Together, along with process and circuit enhancements, these changes support more than 40% performance improvement over the Stratix® 10 family of FPGAs.