Xilinx launched the last of its four 65nm platform FPGA products in the Virtex-5 family at the Globalpress Summit Conference in San Francisco yesterday.

For Virtex-5, Xilinx went down a new strategic route of fragmenting the family with four product types, which Xilinx calls 'domains'.

The reason for doing that was because, as you add more hard cores to FPGA, some people need them and some don't, making it impossible to create a single system family which satisfies everyone. So Xilinx plumped for a multiple version approach.

The first domain was the logic product, called LX. Second, was the LXT which is for logic with serial connectivity, and third was the SXT, for DSP with serial connectivity. The fourth domain, FXT, is for embedded processing with serial connectivity.

The FXT platform comes in five flavours ranging from 33,000 logic blocks to 197,000 logic blocks. Major applications will be wireless basestations and AV broadcasting.

The chips are sampling now and being supplied by both of Xilinx's foundries, UMC and Toshiba.

The FXT platform has a couple of PowerPC 440 cores each providing 1,1000DMIPS at 550MHz, from 8 to 24 Gigabit transceivers supporting data rates from 500Mbits/sec to 6.5Gbits/sec, and from 64 to 384 DSP slices which can provide190 GMACs of DSP processing at 500MHz.

It costs $159 each in quantities of 1,000.