Xilinx’s EasyPath-6 FPGAs deliver fast, simple cost reduction for Virtex-6 FPGAs

BANGALORE, INDIA: Xilinx Inc. today announced EasyPath-6 FPGAs, offering the industry’s lowest total cost with the lowest-risk from high-performance FPGA to production ready devices in just six weeks, the fastest turnaround time of any FPGA cost reduction solution.

The new version of EasyPath FPGAs also does not require minimum order quantities, enabling customers to tailor their shipments to the end market needs, and delivers a 35 percent cost reduction over the FPGA price at equivalent volume.

In addition, while most cost reduction choices stifle design options and unduly constrain customers to a non-optimized part or package, EasyPath-6 FPGAs are unique in that it is the only FPGA reduction solution that supports all devices, all packages, all speed grades, and all temperature grades available in the base family. This means customers can chose any Virtex-6 LX, LXT, SXT, and HXT device to implement and cost reduce their designs.

“EasyPath-6 FPGAs offer compelling value for high-performance system designs that need to respond quickly to cost pressures and uncertain market demands,” said Xilinx Vice President, Product Solutions and Management, Mustafa Veziroglu. “EasyPath-6 technology builds on top of the tried and tested FPGA architecture and silicon and delivers zero-risk cost reduction with the lowest total product cost in 40-nm technology.”

Unlike other approaches, EasyPath-6 FPGAs are neither an ASIC conversion nor a routing-hardened FPGA. The migration from Virtex-6 to EasyPath-6 devices involves no additional design constraints, no re-work or re-optimizing of the FPGA design, and no re-laying out of circuit boards.

Once design files are provided to Xilinx, silicon wafers are tested to the same electrical parameters as the standard FPGAs and are then sorted relative to the specific resources used by the customer’s design. The resulting die are then assembled, marked and final-tested to ensure functionality and performance within six weeks. No other FPGA cost reduction solution offers production devices in such short a period of time from prototype.

Testing for a single design using Xilinx’s patented test technology increases wafer yield, greatly reducing overall costs and requires no additional customer engineering work or re-qualification.

EasyPath-6 FPGAs deliver world-class fault coverage with levels that approach 100 percent and customers have complete flexibility to move between Virtex-6 and EasyPath-6 FPGAs during production. This enables customers to easily ship either EasyPath-6 FPGA or Virtex-6 FPGAs to allow for easy management of unexpected upsides in demand or changes to the design by leveraging the programmability of the underlying device.

As EasyPath-6 FPGAs are architecturally identical to Virtex-6 FPGAs, customers can confidently incorporate into their high-volume designs the entire suite of embedded resources of Virtex-6 FPGAs, including multi-gigabit serial transceivers, PCI Express endpoint blocks, Tri-mode Ethernet MACs, DSP slices, and other resources.

The similarity between EasyPath-6 FPGA and Virtex-6 FPGAs translates into a seamless, one-for-one migration that is unmatched in terms of the low risk path it offers to customers.

The EasyPath-6 FPGAs are available for design implementation effective immediately with production devices available in calendar Q4 2010. EasyPath-6 devices revolutionize FPGA cost reduction by delivering cost- reduced devices in production quantities in only six weeks with no minimum order quantities.