The world has known in a general sense (leaks from financial analysts and partial disclosures) of Tabula Inc.’s deal with Intel Corp. to fabricate the FPGA startup’s 3D Spacetime FPGAs in Intel Corp.’s 22-nm CMOS process technology.  But on Tuesday afternoon (Feb. 22), Tabula vice president of manufacturing technology, Daniel Gitlin, was scheduled to give a presentation to the Ethernet Technology Summit (http://www.ethernetsummit.com) in Santa Clara, Calif. that would put some more detail behind the rumors.

Tabula is not Intel’s first announced partner in 22-nm process – that distinction belongs to Achronix Semiconductor Corp. (http://www.fpgagurus.edn.com/blog/fpga-gurus-blog/achronix%E2%80%99s-foundry-pact-intel-how-big-deal). Nevertheless, Tabula thinks it can gain some distinct advantages from the tri-gate structure of the transistors in Intel’s process technology – allowing chips of unprecedented small size, with minimal power dissipation (http://newsroom.intel.com/docs/DOC-2032). Gitlin made a comparison with the revolutions Intel achieved by adopting high-K metal-gate dielectric technology at 45 nm, with the advantages to be won in moving to 3D stacked transistors at 22 nm.

The advantages will be particularly important in communication designs that move interfaces from 10-Gbits/sec to 40 and 100 Gbits/sec, Gitlin said.  Given that one of Tabula’s first announced customers was network leader Cisco Systems Inc., it’s a fair bet that Cisco may be migrating from Tabula’s first generation of ABAX FPGAs, fabricated in 40-nm CMOS, to the new 3PLD generation.  Intel’s process also makes for efficient implementation of memory cells used by Tabula.

With the first generation of ABAX products, Tabula could take on industry leaders in FPGAs.  But with 3PLD, the company hopes to aim its FPGAs directly against full custom logic, a $110 billion market, Tabula CEO Dennis Segers said.  The tri-gate technology developed by Intel maps much better into Tabula’s time-multiplexed architecture than traditional planar technologies, and makes it easier for the Tabula devices to support multi-GHz system frequencies, he said.  That could make the bulk of the custom-logic market susceptible to displacement by FPGAs in the very near future.

In fact, Segers predicted in an interview that the ability to utilize three-dimensional multiplexing in the Intel tri-gate architecture is a better way to introduce users to FPGA reconfigurability, than the change in microprogramming of an FPGA that was touted in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“Within Tabula, we like to call that ‘hide the revolution,’ not in the sense of keeping our underlying technology hidden, but in the sense of making designers feel comfortable with the way in which reconfigurability can be used,” Segers said.

Tabula was taking the stage at the Ethernet summit with many chip players who are working in the physical-layer realm on meeting the interface needs of 40- and 100-Gbit Ethernet networks.  Segers said that it is interesting to watch Xilinx and Altera work on transceiver speeds of 25 Gbits/sec and above, and even on direct optical interfaces on an FPGA, but Tabula believes that all high-speed communications on a chip need to be “impedance-matched” – avoiding too big a disconnect between the FPGA logic and the communication fabric supporting it.  Tabula will invest in on-chip transceiver technology for very fast designs, Segers said, but also will work with third-party physical-layer chip specialists to keep some interfaces off the FPGA itself when it makes more sense.

What Intel has not made clear, with either its Tabula or Achronix relationships, is whether it will use either foundry deal to enter FPGA markets in an indirect way.  Intel has worked in arms-length fashion with Altera Corp. to offer configurable versions of its own Atom processor, but Intel has no true competitor to the multiple vendors that offer FPGAs with embedded ARM or MIPS cores.  Maybe that could change, courtesy of Intel’s deals with Tabula and Achronix.  Segers said that all Tabula is disclosing this month is a strict manufacturing deal with Intel.  The company will provide details of sampling when it announces product details later this year, he said.