Accolade Technology has exclusively used Xilinx FPGAs for all products from day one. As a result, we keenly track the latest FPGA technology trends with an eye to how we can utilize new capabilities to help our customers. Recently, Xilinx introduced a new capability in their high-end FPGAs called HBM or High Bandwidth Memory. I won’t go into an exhaustive explanation about HBM as there are many resources on the Internet that will provide detail. However, in short HBM takes advantage of silicon stacking technologies to place the FPGA and the DRAM beside each other in the same package. The result is a co-packaged DRAM structure capable of multi-terabit per second bandwidth. This provides system designers with a significant step function improvement in bandwidth, compared to other memory technologies.

The last statement above is what gets our FPGA designers excited. With this new ultra-high-speed memory access any Accolade feature that relies on table lookup or table access can get orders of magnitude improvement in terms of speed. An example would be our flow shunting capability which relies on a table to track and monitor 10s of millions of flows. With HBM flow shunting suddenly gets a massive boost in performance.

To learn more about HBM or Accolade products in general please contact us at [email protected]