Product Attributes

Xilinx mainstream FPGA products

Xilinx’s mainstream FPGAs are divided into two categories, one focusing on low-cost applications with medium capacity and performance to meet general logic design requirements, such as the Spartan series; and another focusing on high-performance applications with large capacity and performance to meet various high-end applications, such as the Virtex series, users can choose according to their actual application requirements. In the case where performance can be met, priority is given to low-cost devices.

The current mainstream chips of the Spartan series include:

Spartan-2, Spartan-2E, Spartan-3, Spartan-3A and Spartan-3E.

Spartan-3E, Spartan-6, etc.

1. Spartan-2 up to 200,000 system gates.

2. Spartan-2E up to 600,000 system gates.

3. Spartan-3 up to 5 million doors.

4. The Spartan-3A and Spartan-3E not only have a larger system gate count but are also enhanced with a large number of embedded dedicated multipliers and dedicated block RAM resources, providing the ability to implement complex digital signal processing and on-chip programmable systems.

5. The Spartan-6 family of FPGAs is a new generation of FPGA chips introduced by Xilinx in 2009, which has low power consumption and high capacity.

* Spartan-3/3L: A new generation of FPGA products, similar in structure to VirtexII, the world’s first 90nm process FPGA, 1.2v core, launched in 2003.

Brief comments: Low cost, overall performance indicators are not very good, suitable for low-cost applications, is Xilinx’s main products in the low-end FPGA market in the next few years, the current market in the low and medium capacity models are easy to buy, large capacity is relatively less.

* Spartan-3E: based on Spartan-3/3L, further optimized for performance and cost

* Spartan-6: the latest low-cost FPGA from Xilinx

Just launched at the moment, many models are not yet in high-volume production.

The Virtex family is Xilinx’s high-end product and the industry’s top product, and it was with the Vitex family that Xilinx won the market and thus gained its position as the leading FPGA supplier. Xilinx leads the field-programmable gate array industry with its Virtex-6, Virtex-5, Virtex-4, Virtex-II Pro, and Virtex-II family of FPGAs.

The Virtex-4 family of FPGAs uses the Advanced Silicon Modular Block (ASMBL), which is a new technology that is designed to be used in the field.

ASMBL implements the concept of supporting a multi-disciplinary application platform through the use of unique column-based architecture. Each column represents a silicon subsystem with dedicated functions such as logic resources, memory, I/O, DSP, processing, hard IP and mixed-signal, etc. Xilinx assembles specialized domain FPGAs for specific application categories (as opposed to dedicated, which refers to a single application) by combining different functional columns.

4, Virtex-5, Virtex-6, and other categories.

* Virtex-II: introduced in 2002, 0.15um process, 1.5v core, large-scale high-end FPGA products

* Virtex-II pro: VirtexII-based architecture, FPGA products with internal integrated CPU and high-speed interface

* Virtex-4: Xilinx’s latest generation of high-end FPGA products, manufactured on a 90nm process, contains three sub-series: for logic-intensive designs: Virtex-4 LX, for high-performance signal processing applications: Virtex-4 SX, for high-speed serial connectivity and embedded processing applications: Virtex-4 FX.

Brief comments: All indicators are greatly improved to the previous generation VirtexII, which won the 2005 EDN magazine best product title, from the end of 2005 to the start of mass production, will gradually replace the VirtexII, VirtexII-Pro, is the most important Xilinx products in the high-end FPGA market in the next few years.

* Virtex-5: 65nm process product

* Virtex-6: the latest high-performance FPGA product, 45nm

* Virtex-7: the ultra-high-end FPGA product launched in 2011