Spartan 6 appears in the distribution channel

First announced in February, Spartan 6, along with Virtex 6, signalled Xilinx's plan to create a series of application specific design platforms which will also incorporate new IP from Xilinx and third parties.

Applications being targetted include automotive, consumer and wired/wireless communications to aerospace and defence.

Using 40nm for Virtex 6 and 45nm for Spartan 6, the FPGAs use voltage scaling to cut power consumption by up to 50% compared with previous generations, according to the company.

The eleven-member Spartan-6 family offers logic densities ranging from 3,400 to 148,000 logic cells, but with half the power consumption of previous Spartan families, according to the supplier.

There are two versions; the low -end LX devices supporting up to 150K logic density and 4.8Mbit memory.

Then there is the higher spec'ed LXT which can have eight 3.125Gbit/s GTP transceivers and an integrated PCI Express-compatible core for serial connectivity.