Xilinx Shipping All Advanced FPGA Product Lines on 300 mm Technology
Company's Successful Dual Fab Strategy Extends Low Cost Leadership
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its long-standing initiative to reduce cost through technology and deliver the lowest cost solutions to its customers, Xilinx, Inc. today announced it is shipping all advanced FPGA product lines on 300 mm wafers including its Virtex-E(TM), Virtex-II(TM), Virtex-II Pro(TM) and Spartan-IIE(TM) FPGAs. As the largest PLD supplier, Xilinx is among the highest volume purchaser of 300 mm wafers in the world. The company attributes the aggressive move to 300 mm on its strategy to employ a dual fab strategy and designing products to work on a variety of processes. By partnering with both IBM and UMC, Xilinx achieved parallel development on both leading edge process technology from IBM, and the lowest cost process technology available today on 300 mm with UMC.
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020822/XLNXLOGO )
"We have realized our vision of standardizing on 300 mm technology at a much faster pace than expected," said Wim Roelandts, president and CEO at Xilinx. "Our move to 300 mm is an essential element of our strategy to rapidly drive down costs for our customers to further narrow the ASIC gap."
"The cooperative efforts of leading edge fabless companies like Xilinx and leading foundry suppliers has enabled 300mm manufacturing to become the most efficient manufacturing solution. It is these joint initiatives that continue to keep the semiconductor industry on the curve promised by Moore's Law, allowing Xilinx to provide their customers with the most cost effective solution," said Jim Feldhan, president of Semico Research. "Additionally, we are pleased to see that Xilinx has made the commitment to 300mm across its newer FPGA families. This move adds to the productivity of their FPGAs and should help extend their product life cycle."
Virtex-II FPGAs fundamentally redefined the programmable logic landscape, propelling FPGAs from the realm of glue logic into the realm of high performance programmable systems. Today, cumulative revenues from the Virtex-II series are estimated to exceed 40x that of the nearest competitor. The innovative Virtex-II IP-Immersion architecture enables integration of both hard and soft intellectual property (IP), enhanced system memory, and lightning-fast DSP performance, providing the best platform for advanced digital designs in the industry.
With eight devices produced on 300 mm, the Virtex-II Pro family is the world's first and only FPGA to offer integrated PowerPC embedded technology and 3.125 Gbps serial transceivers. Virtex-II Pro devices include these multiple PowerPC CPUs and multi-gigabit serial transceivers at no additional charge, providing unequaled capability and value for today's system design requirements. Xilinx is the only PLD provider to offer over 6,700 logic cells and 500K bits of embedded block memory plus an embedded PowerPC processor and four RocketIO serial transceivers for under $30*.
For high volume applications requiring lower densities, Xilinx offers the world's lowest cost FPGA product line, the Spartan-IIE family, also produced on 300 mm wafers. At up to 514 pins, Spartan-IIE FPGAs deliver the industry's lowest cost per pin, and most comprehensive programmable I/O support. 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.
About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit http://www.xilinx.com/.
CONTACT: Tamara Snowden of Xilinx, Inc., +1-408-879-6146, or
tamara.snowden@xilinx.com
Web site: http://www.xilinx.com/
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