Xilinx announced 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, like Xilinx stated, the lowest cost per logic cell in the FPGA industry. Spartan-3E devices break the $2.00 unit cost barrier for 100K system gates and the $10.00 unit cost barrier for devices over 1M system gates. Xilinx is offering two complementary FPGA families - the Spartan-3 family optimized for I/O-centric designs with lowest cost per IO, and the Spartan-3E family optimized for gate-centric designs with lowest cost per logic cell. 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 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 (MAC: multiply and accumulate operation).
Spartan-3E devices 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. The 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
Software support for the Spartan-3E family is immediately available with the Xilinx ISE (Integrated Software Environment) 7.1i tools, also announced. ISE 7.1i integrates 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.
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. This is the price for 500K unit volume on second half 2006. 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. 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 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.
