Xilinx Spartan-3A FPGA Family Enables Lower Total System Costs

Xilinx Inc. has announced the production availability of small form-factor packages for its Extended Spartan-3A family of FPGAs, delivering breakthrough price points and enabling the reduction of total system costs for building cost-sensitive applications targeting consumer, wired and wireless communications, networking, industrial and many other markets. The Extended Spartan-3A family provides a broad range of densities (from 50,000 to 3.4 million system gates), and power management features to enable designers to drive down system costs by minimizing board components and providing complex computation and embedded processing capabilities. The Extended Spartan-3A family combines small form factor device packaging and the proven high functionality of the Spartan-3A, Spartan-3A DSP and Spartan-3AN platforms into a single, high-volume FPGA family.



Xilinx Extended Spartan-3A FPGA solutions reduce overall system cost by up to 50 percent as compared to competitive low-cost FPGAs. The Xilinx Spartan-3A devices are low cost SRAM FPGAs with built-in power management and minimal power rail support required (only two). The dual power management modes provide instant power savings and eliminate the need for external components such as regulators, heat sinks, buffers, etc. The suspend mode enables up to 40 percent static power savings, as well as quick wake up time and system-level synchronization, while the hibernate mode uses the lowest possible quiescent power (virtually 0µA) with its unique ability to completely power off. The Extended Spartan-3A FPGA family with new package options is in production and available now. Prices start at under US$1.00 for the slowest speed grade XC3S50A device in a VQ100 at 500,000 unit volumes in second half of 2009.