Xilinx introduces Easypath-6 cost-reduction FPGAs

Xilinx has announced the launch of Easypath-6, the latest generation of its FPGA cost-reduction product.

The company said Easypath-6 FPGAs do not require minimum order quantities, enabling customers to tailor their shipments to end-market needs.

They are also said to deliver a 35 per cent cost reduction over the FPGA price at equivalent volume.

Easypath-6 supports all devices, packages, speed grades, and 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 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 rework or re-optimising of the FPGA design, and no relaying 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 results are then assembled, marked and final-tested to ensure functionality and performance within six weeks.

Testing for a single design using Xilinx's test technology is said to increase wafer yield, reducing overall costs, and requires no additional customer engineering work or requalification.

Easypath-6 FPGAs are said to deliver good fault coverage with levels that approach 100 per cent and customers have flexibility to move between Virtex-6 and Easypath-6 FPGAs during production.

This enables customers to easily ship either Easypath-6 FPGAs 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.

Because Easypath-6 FPGAs are architecturally identical to Virtex-6 FPGAs, customers can 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.

Back to top