AMD Teases the Versal RF FPGA SoC Family, for High-Performance Digital Signal Processing Work

New chip put common DSP tasks in hardware to boost performance and lower power draw — but mass production isn't scheduled until 2027.

Gareth Halfacree
2 months agoFPGAs

AMD has announced a new range in its Versal family of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) systems-on-chips (SoCs), designed specifically with digital signal processing (DSP) applications in mind: the Versal RF Series.

"Today's advanced RF [Radio Frequency] systems require high resolution and high sample-rate RF data converters that use massive amounts of DSP compute resources to process data quickly and adapt to changing requirements, shifting workloads and mission profiles," explains AMD's Salil Raje of the problem the company set out to solve. "AMD Versal RF Series adaptive SoCs meet these requirements in a single chip, offering leadership RF-sampling resolution and more DSP compute than multiple SoCs combined."

Designed as a successor to AMD's existing Zynq RFSoC range, the Versal RF family offers the flexibility of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) alongside fixed hard processing cores: two Arm Cortex-A72 application-class processors and two Cortex-R5F real-time processors with floating-point acceleration. The RF part, meanwhile, is handled by dedicated high-performance analog to digital and digital to analog converters (ADCs and DACs), alongside dedicated hardware blocks for an on-board polyphase arbitrary resampler, LDPC decoder, channelizer, and fast Fourier transform (FFT) engine.

AMD is positioning the parts as being ideal for digital signal processing, claiming up to 80 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of DSP compute — 19 times the compute available on an equivalent Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC in channelizer mode, the company says. The dedicated hardware blocks, meanwhile, deliver a claimed dynamic power consumption drop of 80 percent compared to performing the same tasks in soft logic on the FPGA.

AMD has published development tools for the Versal RF Series, but does not expect hardware samples to be available until late 2025 — and is projecting the first half of 2027 for mass production and general availability. More information is available on the AMD website.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
Latest articles
Sponsored articles
Related articles
Latest articles
Read more
Related articles