XILINX LAUNCHES ROADMAP FOR UP TO TWO-THIRDS POWER REDUCTION

"The debut of Spartan-3 FPGAs with up to 66% reduction in quiescent power consumption is another example of market-driven innovation from Xilinx," said Clay Johnson, vice president and general manager of the General Products Division at Xilinx, "We work closely with our customers to understand their low power requirements. With their guidance and our leadership in low power IC design and manufacturing, Xilinx is producing programmable logic devices optimized for new, larger markets."

New Applications for Reduced Power FPGAs
Xilinx IC design and manufacturing has been at the leading edge of power management and reduction throughout its history. Its FPGA densities and performance have improved significantly with each product generation while power consumption has remained relatively constant, thus exponentially decreasing the "power-per-gate-per MHz" measurement. Xilinx is extending its state-of-the-art power management techniques and developing new power-related innovations to address requirements at the boundaries of low-power applications.

"Power consumption has been a barrier keeping FPGAs out of a number of ASIC sockets. As newer generations of FPGAs continue to reduce their power drain, more and more applications can use a programmable architecture for the silicon residing at the heart of their system," reports Jordan Selburn, analyst at iSuppli Corporation. "While defining 'low power' is challenging, preliminary iSuppli estimates indicate that as much as $3 billion of the approximately $20 billion ASIC market could potentially shift to FPGAs if power consumption was reduced sufficiently."

Providing Platform FPGA Features with Reduced Power
Since it introduced the first FPGA twenty years ago, Xilinx has improved the density, performance and cost of programmable devices by several orders of magnitude. This led to the rapid evolution of FPGAs from low volume prototyping devices to multi-million gate, high performance platforms. Xilinx subsequently pioneered the low-cost FPGA segment enabling new innovation and differentiation for a variety of high-volume, cost-sensitive consumer products. The advent of low power Spartan-3 FPGAs will significantly expand the FPGA market to power and heat sensitive products such as consumer appliances and rack-mounted equipment - applications previously served primarily by application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).

Availability
Extending the scope of the low cost 90nm Spartan-3 family, samples of reduced power Spartan-3 devices will be available by the end of 2004. Since its introduction in 2003, the Spartan-3 family has enjoyed unprecedented market demand for deployment in consumer-oriented, cost-sensitive applications. Now companies will be able to employ programmable logic in applications where both cost and power consumption are critical factors.

The original press release can be found here.