FPGAs Eye Low-Cost, High-Volume Apps

Marketed as the industry's lowest-cost family of FPGAs for high-volume applications, the Spartan-3 provides users with 50,000 to five million system gates. Manufactured using a copper-based, 90-nm process, the eight-member XC3Sxxxx family is said to offer an 80% chip-size reduction compared to 130-nm technology. Other features of the new FPGAs include up to 784 I/Os, up to 330 billion multiply and accumulates (MACs) per second, up to 104 embedded 18-bit multipliers, and distributed RAM. In addition, the devices support 23 parallel I/O standards, both single-ended and differential signaling, via pre-engineered-compliant cores, including PCI 32/33 and PCI 64/33 types. Development support is in the form of the company's integrated software environment (ISE), as well as a number of third-party offerings. Available in a variety of packages, single-unit pricing for the new FPGAs ranges from under $3.50 for the 50k gate XC3S50 to under $20 for the 1M gate XC3S1000. For more information, contact XILINX INC., San Jose, CA. (801) 424-0192.