First Intel structured ASIC for 5G, AI, cloud and edge announced

Intel introduces the Intel eASIC N5X, the first all-new structured ASIC to accelerate 5G, cloud, artificial intelligence and edge workloads. The Intel eASIC N5X was announced in November 2020 at the Intel FPGA Technology Day. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

Intel introduces the Intel eASIC N5X, the first all-new structured ASIC to accelerate 5G, cloud, artificial intelligence and edge workloads. The Intel eASIC N5X was announced in November 2020 at the Intel FPGA Technology Day. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

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What’s New: At Intel FPGA Technology Day, Intel announced a new, customizable solution to help accelerate application performance across 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud and edge workloads. The new Intel® eASIC N5X is the first structured eASIC family with an Intel® FPGA compatible hard processor system. The Intel eASIC N5X helps customers migrate both their custom logic and designs — using the embedded hard processor in the FPGA — to structured ASICs, bringing benefits like lower unit cost, faster performance and reduced power consumption.

“The potential for data to transform industries and business has never been greater. The announcement of the new Intel eASIC N5X uniquely positions our customers to more fully benefit from the flexibility and time-to-market advantages of Intel FPGAs with the performance benefits and lower operating power of structured ASICs. The combination of FPGA, eASIC and ASIC products from Intel enables customers to take advantage of this potential by providing what we call the ‘custom logic continuum,’ and is a capability not available from any other vendor in the market.” –Dave Moore, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the Programmable Solutions Group

Why It Matters: FPGAs offer the best time-to-market advantage and highest flexibility for customer designs, while ASICs and structured ASIC devices provide the best hardware-optimized performance at the lowest power and cost. FPGAs are ideal for enabling agile innovation and are the fastest path to next-generation technology exploration. The programmability of FPGAs helps customers quickly develop hardware for their specific workloads and adapt to changing standards over time – as happened during the early phases of the 5G rollout and the migration toward open RAN implementations.

The new innovative Intel eASIC N5X devices deliver up to 50% lower core power and lower cost compared to FPGAs, while providing faster time to market and lower non-recurring engineering costs compared to ASICs. This allows customers to create power-optimized, high-performance and highly differentiated solutions. Intel eASIC N5X devices also help customers to meet the key security needs of many applications by incorporating a secure device manager adapted from the Intel® Agilex™ FPGA family, including secure boot, authentication and anti-tamper features.

Intel’s Unique Approach: Intel is the world’s only semiconductor company to offer the complete custom logic continuum of FPGAs, such as Intel Agilex and Intel® Stratix™ 10; structured ASICs, such as Intel eASIC N5X; and ASICs to its customers. This comprehensive data-processing portfolio of customizable logic devices helps enable Intel customers to truly optimize unit cost, performance, power consumption and time to market for their market-specific solutions in a manner that’s unique in the industry.