Xilinx debuts low-cost Spartan-DSP series

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 4/4/2007

Programmable logic player Xilinx Inc. introduced this week its new low-cost Spartan-DSP series with development boards and enhanced design software as part of its family of XtremeDSP solutions.

According to Xilinx, the Spartan-DSP series provides high DSP performance at the lowest cost points in the FPGA industry, delivering over 20 GMACS for under $30, while consuming up to 50 percent less dynamic power than other high-performance reconfigurable devices for DSP functions at this performance point.

The Spartan-3A DSP platform features the 3SD3400A device delivering over 30 GMACS and 2200 Gbit-per-second memory bandwidth and the 3SD1800A device with over 20 GMACS and 1500 Gbit-per-second memory. At the heart of the Spartan-3A DSP architecture is the company's new cost-optimized XtremeDSP slice, DSP48A, that Xilinx claims enables designers to implement many independent arithmetic functions.

The architecture also supports connecting multiple DSP48A slices to form wide math functions, DSP filters, and complex arithmetic functions without the use of general logic fabric. Xilinx claims the new DSP48A slice reduces power in common FIR filters by 50 percent compared to other high-performance reconfigurable devices.

In addition to the XtremeDSP DSP48A slice, the Spartan-3A DSP platform purports to deliver up to 53,712 logic cells, 2268 Kbits of performance-enhanced Block RAM (BRAM), and 373 Kbits of distributed RAM that Xilinx says collectively can be configured to optimize a broad range of signal processing requirements.

Engineering samples are now shipping for the Spartan-3A DSP platform with the 3SD3400A device immediately available and the 3SD1800A device to follow later this quarter. The 3SD3400A device is priced at $44.95 and the 3SD1800A device at $29.85.

In February, Xilinx began shipments of its 65-nm Virtex-5 SXT FPGAs optimized for high-performance DSP, which it touted as the first DSP-optimized FPGA family to integrate serial transceivers.