Xilinx Ships One Million Spartan-3 FPGAs - Delivers PLD Industry's First 90nm Family In High Volume
Xilinx, Inc. today announced it has shipped one million 90nm Spartan-3 devices - executing on delivery of the world's first 90nm FPGA family. Xilinx leads the PLD industry by more than a year on 90nm process technology with manufacturing partner UMC. Xilinx also announced on September 13, 2004, the immediate availability of the company's second 90nm product-line the Virtex-4 multi-platform FPGA family. Xilinx leveraged the 90nm expertise acquired through Spartan-3 volume production to accelerate its deployment of the Virtex-4 platform FPGA family on proven 90nm technology.
Xilinx strategy to aggressively deploy 90nm process technology is paying off with excellent yields at two UMC manufacturing facilities. To date, Xilinx has shipped five of eight Spartan-3 family members in high volume production. Additionally, the company has shipped Spartan-3 family members to over 1200 customers worldwide since the family's introduction in early 2003. The extremely low price points provided by the 90nm/300mm process are propelling Spartan-3 FPGAs into cost-sensitive applications previously the exclusive domain of ASICs and ASSPs, including digital consumer, instrumentation, and telecommunications.
"Today's milestone validates our decision to aggressively move to advanced process technologies early on," said Clay Johnson, vice president of the General Products Division at Xilinx. "The tremendous silicon capacity provided by 300mm wafers and 90nm lithography has enabled Xilinx to provide groundbreaking cost-density benefits to our customers and support huge volume orders generated by the Spartan-3 family's low price points."
"This production milestone proves conclusively that Xilinx is the dominant leader in the deployment of 90nm/300mm process technologies for programmable logic devices," said Fu Tai, president of the American Business Group at UMC. "UMC is pleased to partner with Xilinx to help meet unprecedented customer demand for its low-cost Spartan-3 family and to bring its Virtex-4 multi-platform family to market in record time."
Platform Features for Low Cost, High Volume Applications
The 90nm Spartan-3 platform is the world's lowest-cost FPGA offering unrivaled price points with more density and performance features than any other device in its class. They feature an industry-leading combination of block and distributed RAM, up to 784 I/Os, MicroBlaze 32-bit RISC soft processors and XtremeDSP functionality with dedicated 18x18 multipliers that deliver up to 330 billion multiply and accumulates (MACs) per second. Additionally, Spartan-3 devices support 24 leading I/O standards, including PCI, DDR, LVDS and RSDS.
