"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.
Related stories:
Poseidon Design Systems Introduces ESL Tools That Analyze, Optimize and Accelerate Processor-Based Designs
Triton Tool Suite Enables Designers to Trade off Performance, Power and Cost for SoCs, Platform ASICs, Structured Arrays and FPGAs
Poseidon Design Systems, Inc. today announced an Electronic System Level (ESL) tool suite - Triton Tuner(TM) and Triton Builder(TM) - that automates the process of optimizing and substantially accelerating processor-based designs. Based on a SystemC software and hardware co-simulation environment, transactional-level modeling (TLM)
technology, and Poseidon's innovative HW/SW partitioning technology, the Triton tool suite enables SoC designers to co-simulate hardware and software at the architectural level, then tune and accelerate the embedded system for optimal performance, power and cost.
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.
Oxygen Ions for Fuel Cells Get Loose at Low Temperatures
Seeking to understand a new fuel cell material, a research team working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the University of Liverpool, has uncovered a novel structure that moves oxygen ions through the cell at substantially lower temperatures than previously thought possible. The finding announced this month in Nature Materials may be key to solving fuel cell reliability issues and lead to reduced operating costs in high-performance stationary fuel cells.
Novel memory device is set to rival transistor-switched silicon-based memory
Working with an international group of researchers, Professor Gehan Amaratunga has produced a novel memory device which is set to rival transistor-switched silicon-based memory.
Bioenergy potential of reviving abandoned agricultural land
Across the globe, hundreds of millions of acres of once-productive agricultural land lie abandoned, according to a new report from researchers at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science. If this land was used to grow crops for conversion into biofuel, it could help ease the energy crunch without worsening the world food shortage or contributing to global warming.
Stroke study reveals key target for improving treatment and suggests that Gleevec may help
Research in mice shows why tPA carries risks as well as benefits, and suggests that Gleevec or other drugs could prevent problems
For over a decade, the drug called tPA has proven its worth as the most effective emergency treatment for the most common kind of stroke. But its promise is blemished by two facts: tPA can cause dangerous bleeding in the brain, and its brain-saving power fades fast after the third hour of a stroke.
Gene variation may be why some don't respond to cholesterol-lowering drugs
A variation in the way the body processes a single protein may explain why some people don't respond well to drugs that lower "bad" cholesterol, according to a report in
Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Vision sensors keep their eye on the ball at Euro 2008
The silky skills of Europe’s top footballers will not be the only eye catcher this summer as the movement of the fans themselves fall under the watchful gaze of state-of-the-art video surveillance.