Xilinx ships 90-nanometer devices in volume production--addresses record demand for its low cost Spartan-3 FPGAs.

Xilinx, Inc. (Nasdaq:XLNX) has announced it is shipping five members of its Spartan-3 family in volume production to over 1200 customers worldwide, including the XC3S50, XC3S200, XC3S400, XC3S1000 and XC3S1500 devices. The Spartan-3 family is the only 90nm FPGA family in production and is the highest density and lowest cost FPGA family in its class. Already, more than 3,000 Spartan-3 development kits are in customer hands for a broad range of low-cost consumer electronics, industrial, data processing and communications applications.

"Because Xilinx has gone to production with 90nm technology potentially a full year ahead of the FPGA industry, our customers are benefiting from the world's lowest cost FPGA family today," said Kapil Shankar, senior director of the General Products Division at Xilinx. ""The tremendous I/O and logic cost advantages of Spartan-3 FPGAs have led to record demand for the family."

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.

The Spartan-3 Starter Kit is an easy-to-use, low cost development system that provides instant access to the complete platform capabilities of the Spartan-3 family. The $99 kit provides all the elements needed to develop, debug and complete a design, including software, JTAG programming cables and training material.