With the expansion of the Spartan-IIE family, Xilinx is extending its lead in delivering high-I/O devices to FPGA and ASIC customers for low-cost applications such as set-top boxes, plasma display, and broadcast video equipment. At up to 514 pins, Spartan-IIE FPGAs deliver the industry's lowest cost per pin, and most comprehensive programmable I/O support. Now, designers have 100 percent greater I/O capacity with Xilinx Spartan-IIE devices than any other competing FPGA solution in the same density range. With the industry's lowest cost per pin, designers currently using gate arrays or ASICs can easily migrate to Spartan FPGAs without the associated high NRE (non-recurring engineering) costs, long design cycles or risks.

With the new XC2S400E (400,000 system gates and 410 I/Os) and XC2S600E (600,000 system gates and 514 I/Os) devices, designers can integrate even more functionality into smaller form factors. Additionally, Xilinx addresses customer density and I/O requirements through a critical migration path that offers the flexibility to choose various devices within the family in a common package without having to change package pin-out or footprint.

"Spartan-II and Spartan-IIE FPGAs are central to many of Ixia's top-selling products. We are excited about Xilinx's new high density, high pin-count Spartan-IIE parts which now offer us a level of flexibility and I/O capability previously only found in the Virtex(TM) family," said Doug Schafer, manager of Ethernet Products Development at Ixia, a leading provider of multi-port traffic generation and performance analysis (www.ixiacom.com).

"Based upon market research, we know that devices with up to 304 pins serve approximately 41 percent of the total ASIC market. The Spartan-IIE extension products, with I/O counts up to 514 I/Os, extend the available market served by Xilinx to 65 percent of total ASIC shipments -- a nearly 60 percent increase in the served available market for the Spartan-IIE family," said Clay Johnson, vice president and general manager of the General Products Division at Xilinx. "By broadening the Spartan Series offering with new devices at higher densities and I/O counts, Xilinx is underscoring Xilinx's FPGA leadership and commitment to consumer, home networking, digital video, broadband and automotive market segments in which customers are primarily concerned with overall development costs. With our cost-optimized Spartan Series solution - which includes proven software tools and methodologies, a robust IP library and design services -- designers can readily meet increased time to market pressures and their low-cost goals."

In a separate announcement, Xilinx today unveiled the newest addition to its eSP web portal (www.xilinx.com/esp), with a focus on professional broadcasting. The portal is the industry's only on-line resource dedicated to accelerating all phases of product development for professional video broadcast applications. Both the Spartan-IIE extensions and Virtex devices, with high density and high I/O counts, are ideally suited for this $9B market segment that is expected to grow to $13.8B by 2006 (Source iSuppli).

Spartan Series: a proven architecture over four generations

Since introducing Spartan more than four years ago, Xilinx has delivered four generation and shipped over 40 million Spartan Series devices starting as low as $2.55 per device. With the Spartan Series, designers get the advantages of high I/O-count gate arrays and ASICs, but with the added flexibility of a general purpose, programmable architecture. They also get the benefits of a proven architecture with the industry's fastest and most productive software tools plus the most comprehensive offering of IP cores from Xilinx and third-party AllianceCORE(TM) vendors. In 2003, the company is on track to deliver a fifth generation of the Spartan Series, reaching even higher densities and pin counts at significantly lower price points.

MicroBlaze Soft Processor Support

Customers can also use the Xilinx® MicroBlaze(TM) 32-bit field programmable controller option with the Spartan Series devices. MicroBlaze is the fastest, most powerful soft processor and peripheral solution on the market today for traditional 16 and 32-bit microprocessor and microcontroller applications, among them control instrumentation, test and measurement, automotive and high-end consumer. Integrated into high I/O-count Spartan devices, MicroBlaze is also ideal for designing low-cost, field-programmable controller solutions that offer excellent I/O expansion capabilities and a fully configurable peripheral set for microcontroller users. A typical MicroBlaze system, which includes a soft processor core, bus structure, UART, timer, SPI, GPIO, and UART peripherals connected to the IBM CoreConnect(TM) bus, consumes less than 6% of the total available logic resources in the XC2S600E Spartan-IIE FPGA, while delivering 49 Dhrystone MIPS at 75 MHz.

Software and IP Support

Xilinx offers designers the industry's most complete programmable logic design environment and the most robust offering of integrated IP cores. The company's ISE (Integrated Software Environment) Foundation includes the industry's most advanced timing driven implementation tools available for programmable logic design, along with design entry, synthesis and verification capabilities ( http://www.xilinx.com/ise5 ), Xilinx offers more than 200 IP cores, including PCI, DSP and other pre-designed and tested solutions ( http://www.xilinx.com/ipcenter ).

Pricing and Availability

Spartan-IIE devices are shipping in full volume production today with the newest family members, XC2S400E (400,000 system gates and 410 I/Os) and XC2S600E (600,000 system gates and 514 I/Os), available in volume production in January 2003 from distributors worldwide, or direct from Xilinx at www.xilinx.com/spartan, and are priced at $27 and $45 respectively (250K volume). The new parts are available in a variety of packaging options (e.g. 256, 456-pin and 676 FG) and will be shipping in volume in Q1 2003.

Shipping today using 300mm wafer technology, the Spartan-IIE family offers designers the world's lowest cost solution for system design, and is the only true FPGA alternative to traditional, high cost gate array and ASIC design. Today, Spartan Series pricing ranges from $2.55 for the XCS05XL-VQ100 (5,000 system gates) to $17.95 for the XC2S300E-PQ208 (300,000 system gates), in volumes greater than 250,000 units.

About Xilinx

Xilinx, Inc. is the worldwide leader of programmable logic and programmable system solutions. Additional information about Xilinx is available at www.xilinx.com.

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