Industry’s first heterogeneous SiP devices to Integrate HBM2 DRAM with FPGAs

Altera has unveiled the industry’s first heterogeneous System-in-Package (SiP) devices that integrate stacked High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) from SK Hynix with high-performance Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs. Stratix 10 DRAM SiP represents a new class of devices that is specifically architected to meet the most demanding memory bandwidth requirements in high-performance systems. Stratix 10 DRAM SiP will offer over 10X higher memory bandwidth relative to discrete DRAM solutions that are available today. This unprecedented level of bandwidth is required in data center, broadcast, wireline networking and high-performance computing systems, which are processing an ever-increasing amount of data. Altera is the first company to integrate this breakthrough 3D stacked memory technology alongside an FPGA. Stratix 10 DRAM SiP enables users to customize their workloads and achieve the highest memory bandwidth in a power-efficient manner. Altera is actively working with over a dozen customers to integrate these DRAM SiP products into their next-generation high-end systems, says the company. Altera's heterogeneous SiP products are enabled by using Intel’s Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technology. EMIB technology uses a small high-performance, high-density silicon bridge to connect multiple die together in a single package. EMIB technology features very short traces between die, allowing Altera to cost-effectively build heterogeneous SiP devices that provide higher performance and higher throughput at lower power compared to interposer-based solutions, says the company. “Supporting higher memory bandwidth requirements is one of the biggest challenges many of our customers face as they implement more computationally intensive tasks in their systems, such as machine learning, big data analytics, image recognition, workload acceleration and 8K video processing,” said Danny Biran, senior vice president of corporate strategy and marketing, Altera. “Altera is in a unique position to serve these system requirements by combining the industry’s highest performance FPGA with High-Bandwidth Memory in a single package. No other programmable solution can match Stratix 10 DRAM SiP in terms of performance, power efficiency and memory bandwidth.” Altera’s heterogeneous SiP strategy is to integrate into a single package a monolithic FPGA with advanced components, such as memory, processors, analog, optical and various hardened protocols. The highly-integrated SiP products address the most demanding performance and memory bandwidth requirements for high-end applications in the communications, high-performance computing, broadcast and military segments.