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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
XILINX SHATTERS PRICE/DENSITY BARRIER FOR LOW
COST FPGAS
WITH NEW SPARTAN-3E FAMILY STARTING AT LESS THAN $2.00
Spartan-3E devices available for less than $2.00*
for 100K gates
and less than $9.00* for 1.2M gates
GLOBAL PRESS SUMMIT, MONTEREY, Calif., March 1, 2005 - Xilinx,
Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced immediate availability of its
Spartan™-3E FPGA family - the company's fourth family to utilize
state-of-the-art 90nm process technology. Ranging from 100K to 1.6M
system gates, the Spartan-3E family delivers the lowest cost per
logic cell in the FPGA industry. Spartan-3E devices are the first
to break the $2.00* unit cost barrier for 100K system gates and
the $10.00 unit cost barrier for devices over 1M system gates. By
leveraging the proven success of the Spartan Series and over two
years in 90nm chip-making experience, Xilinx has further refined
its low cost product line to deliver capability and price points
unmatched in the industry. Visit www.xilinx.com/spartan3e
for more information.
With Spartan-3E, Xilinx is poised to further penetrate the high
volume, consumer market by offering design engineers two complementary
low cost FPGA families - the Spartan-3 family optimized for I/O-centric
designs with the industry's lowest cost per IO, and the Spartan-3E
family optimized for gate-centric designs with the industry's lowest
cost per logic cell. This complementary approach allows designers
to choose a Spartan-3 Generation FPGA with the right mix of capabilities
and price points for their specific applications.
"Xilinx Spartan FPGAs provided Yamaha with a low cost, highly
functional solution for our latest electronic piano," said
Jun Ishii, Manager of Disklavier Division at Yamaha Corporation.
"With platform features such as block and distributed RAM,
we were able to lower our overall costs by reducing the total number
of components. And by leveraging the inherent flexibility of FPGAs,
we were able to fine-tune sound quality during the research phase
to deliver an electronic piano with cutting-edge sound at extremely
low price points."
"With today's news, Xilinx continues to drive mainstream adoption
of low-cost FPGAs further into high-volume consumer applications,"
said Wim Roelandts, chairman, president & CEO at Xilinx. "Our
experience in consumer markets spans three generations of Spartan
Series products, giving Xilinx a unique understanding of stringent
consumer requirements where product differentiation and personalization
are paramount. With Spartan-3E, a broader set of designers will
reap the benefits of programmability due to a powerful combination
of platform FPGA functionality delivered at incredibly low price
points."
Optimized for Consumer Electronics Applications
In 1998, Xilinx ignited the low cost FPGA revolution with the introduction
of the Spartan Series. Today, Spartan Series FPGAs are broadly adopted
in high-volume, consumer applications, with over 100 million units
shipped and $1 billion in cumulative revenue. With Spartan-3E, Xilinx
continues to add new market-specific features to its low cost Spartan
Series while reducing the cost by 30X since its introduction, offering
1000 logic cells for as little as $0.46.
The Spartan-3E family is extremely well suited to meet the price,
performance, and functionality requirements of the latest digital
consumer products, such as flat panel televisions. "To accomplish
the transformation from analog to digital broadcasting, OEMs are
turning to programmable logic vendors like Xilinx for digital TV
sets and nearly every piece of broadcasting equipment developed
in the past few years. FPGAs are reprogrammable, which is extremely
beneficial in an industry that is still defining standards. As standards
evolve, systems can be easily upgraded without replacing entire
pieces of equipment," said Brian Matas, vice president of Market
Research at IC Insights.
What Do Designers Get for $2.00?
The Spartan-3E family is focused on reducing unit and overall system
costs by offering a wide range of platform features at extremely
low price points. For example, the Spartan-3E family implements
microprocessor, microcontroller and digital signal processing functions
at standard product pricing, including the 32-bit MicroBlaze™
embedded processor for an effective cost of $0.48, the 8-bit PicoBlaze™
embedded processor for less than $0.10 and a DSP cost/performance
ratio of less than $1/GMAC/s.
Spartan-3E devices also include a host of features tuned for the
consumer electronics market, including support for 18 common I/O
standards including PCI 64/66, PCI-X 100, RSDS, and mini-LVDS as
well as interfaces to commodity priced DDR memories. These built-in
platform features reduce the need for other discrete devices, lowering
overall system costs and simplifying design. The Spartan-3E family
also lowers system costs by supporting commodity serial (SPI) and
byte-wide, parallel flash memory for configuration, along with the
Xilinx Platform Flash solution. Since many high-volume systems already
include flash memory with a few mega-bits of unused capacity, FPGA
configuration memory can cost nothing.
ISE 7.1i Design Tools Deliver the Lowest Logic Costs
Software support for the Spartan-3E family is immediately available
with the Xilinx ISE (Integrated Software Environment) 7.1i tools,
also announced today. ISE 7.1i incorporates unique elements of integration,
speed, and ease of use to resolve some of the most pressing challenges
for its rapidly growing user base of over 200,000 designers. ISE
7.1i integrates key new power analysis, hierarchical design, simulation,
and debug features, and supports the growing movement to Linux-based
design environments. ISE 7.1i also supports the Xilinx Virtex™-4
family - the world's fastest platform FPGAs in every performance
category. For complete ISE 7.1i tool information, visit
http://www.xilinx.com/ise.
Pricing and Availability
Already, Spartan-3E devices are being delivered into the hands of
customers including first customer shipments of the Spartan XC3S100E
device with 100K system gates for under $2.00*. Additional family
members will begin shipping in Q205. All five Spartan-3E family
members will be available in volume production in second half of
2005 from distributors worldwide or direct from the Xilinx online
store at www.xilinx.com/store.
Spartan-3E devices are initially available in -4C speed-temperature
grades. Pb-free packaging industrial grade and -5 speed grade devices
will be available second half of 2005. Several device densities
are available for each package, enabling migration to larger or
smaller logic densities with no board re-layout. The Spartan-3E
Starter Kit is available for only US$149 and includes a XC3S500E
device, serial (SPI) and parallel flash memories, 32MB DDR memory
and support for USB2.0 and 10/100 Ethernet.
About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic
solutions. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.
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# 0531
*500K unit volume, second half 2006
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