Xilinx has announced launching the  Spartan-6 and Virtex-6 families of field-programmable gate arrays.

The sixth generation in the Spartan FPGA Series, the Spartan-6 FPGA family is fabricated on low-power 45-nanometer (nm), 9-metal layer, dual-oxide process technology and is intended to take Xilinx up closer to serving high-volume consumer applications.

At up to 50 percent lower power and 20 percent lower cost than previous generations of FPGA, Virtex-6 is implemented on a 40-nm process technology and up to delivers up to 760k logic cells.

The Virtex-6 devices offer up to 2.5 times the logic capacity of the Virtex-5 generation and twice the DSP resources. A variety of serial communications transceivers are included on different FPGAs that can operate at 3.2-, 6.5- and 11.2-Gbits per second.

The Spartan-6 family is priced at between about $3 and $54 in high volume of 10,000 units, according to Brent Pryzbus, director of product marketing. The Virtex-6 range is priced at between $50 and $2,000, depending on FPGA logic capacity and volume.