Accolade Technology uses Xilinx FPGAs exclusively for all products and also fully supports Xilinx Alveo Accelerator Cards. 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. In the summer of 2019, Xilinx introduced a new capability in their high-end FPGAs such as the UltraScale+ called HBM or High Bandwidth Memory. For a detailed look at HBM watch this video: https://www.xilinx.com/video/fpga/high-bandwidth-memory.html.

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.

HBM was the key technology which propelled all Accolade features that rely on table lookup or table access to make orders of magnitude improvement in terms of speed. The best example is any of our flow classification related features such as flow shunting 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].