Breakthrough triple-oxide 90nm technology reduces power consumption by 50 percent

New technology used to manufacture Virtex-4 FPGAs expected to cut power consumption in half while significantly increasing performance over previous generation devices

HSINCHU, Taiwan, and SAN JOSE, Calif., June 14, 2004 - Xilinx, Inc., the world's leading supplier of programmable logic solutions and inventor of the FPGA, and leading global semiconductor foundry UMC, today announced production of the industry's first FPGA products manufactured using 90nm triple-oxide technology. By using three different thicknesses of the insulating gate oxide layers, the companies were able to break the traditional tradeoff between power consumption and performance, and expect to lower static and dynamic power consumption by 50 percent from previous generation devices with the Virtex-4TM platform FPGA family. Xilinx has already received initial wafers from UMC using this breakthrough triple-oxide 90nm technology.