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Xillinx ship 90nm process FPGA
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Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Xilinx said that it is shipping samples of a new field programmable gate array (FPGA), the Spartan-3 using a 90nm process technology.
"About six weeks ago, Texas Instruments Inc shipped the industry's first chip with 90nm technology. Xilinx is the second company in the semiconductor industry and the first PLD company to ship 90nm chips in the market," said Sandeep Vij, vice president of worldwide marketing of Xilinx (photo).
The Spartan-3 is a low-cost version of the Virtex-II FPGA, which is the second high-end product of the company. Basic chip architectures of the both products are the same. But Spartan-3 has less functionality than Virtex-II. For example, Spartan-3 does not have high-speed I/O or Serdes (serializer-desirealizer), which are integrated on Virtex-II. The target markets also are different. Virtex-II is aiming at high-end applications like routers and switches. By contrast, the target of the Spartan-3 is the cost-sensitive market. "Applications of Spartan-3 sample chips are digital consumer equipment like DVD-RWs, residential gateways, low cost routers, and medical electronics," said Vij.
Compared to the previous Spartan-IIE, the Spartan-3 includes some new functions. For example, impedance controlled I/O that eliminates external resistance components, and high-performance multipliers that provides DSP function. The Spartan-3 has doubled the I/O pads rings (figure). It provides more I/O compared to the traditional single pad ring. As the architectures of Spartan-IIE and Spartan-3 are different, there is no pin compatibility between them. And Spartan-3 also has no pin compatibility with Virtex-II.
The Spartan-3 family consists of eight members. The smallest member has 1,728 logic cells (50K system gates). The largest one has 74,880 logic cells (5M system gates). The XC3S50 (smallest member) and XC3S1000 (mid-scale member, 17,280 logic cells, 1M system gates) are being shipped in sample quantities now. Other members will be shipped in samples in the second quarter of 2003. Production shipping is scheduled to start at the beginning of 2004. The price for the XC3S50 and XC3S1000 for 2004 will be less than US$3.50 and US$20, respectively.
At the press conference, Vij revealed that IBM Corp of the US and United Microelectronics Corp of Taiwan are producing the Spartan-3 for Xilinx. Both companies use low-k material and FSG as an insulator. But he did not reveal the production shares of IBM and UMC.
By: DocMemory
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