Xilinx Virtex-6

On Monday July 27, 2009, Xilinux announced its newest generation Virtex®-6 FPGA family is compliant with the PCI Express® 2.0 specification, delivering up to 50 percent lower power than previous generations and 15 percent higher performance than competitive offerings. The second-generation PCIe® block integrated in Xilinx® Virtex-6 FPGAs has passed PCI-SIG PCI Express version 2.0 compliance and interoperability testing for 1 to 8-lane configurations, adding to the broad range of design resources from Xilinx and its alliance members that support the widely adopted serial interconnect standard. This significant industry milestone is expected to accelerate mainstream development of high bandwidth PCIe 2.0 systems for communications, multimedia, server and mobile platforms, enabling applications such as high definition video, high-end medical imaging, and industrial instrumentation among others.

Virtex®-6 FPGA was announced on 02/02/2009 for the 1st fime. At up to 50 percent lower power and 20 percent lower cost than previous generations of FPGA, Virtex-6 is implemented on a 40-nm process technology and up to delivers up to 760k logic cells.

With a 1.0-V core voltage with a 0.9-V low-power option, Xilinx claimed that the Virtex-6 offers 15 percent higher performance and 15 percent lower power consumption compared to competitor 40-nm FPGA offerings. These advances enable system architects to integrate Virtex-6 FPGAs into their designs to enable green central offices and data centers, the company said. Virtex-6 comes in LXT, HXT, and SXT versions with different combinations of storage, DSP and serial communications performance.

The Virtex-6 devices offer up to 2.5 times the logic capacity of the Virtex-5 generation and twice the DSP resources. A variety of serial communications transceivers are included on different FPGAs that can operate at 3.2-, 6.5- and 11.2-Gbits per second.

While the Spartan-6 family which was also announced 02/02/2009 is priced at between about $3 and $54 in high volume of 10,000 units, the Virtex-6 range is priced at between $50 and $2,000, depending on FPGA logic capacity and volume.