Xilinx Develops New Military Grade FPGA Chips

When it comes down to electronics, the aerospace and defense market have very special requirements that are not that easy to address, so Xilinx redesigned their Spartan-6Q and Virtex-6Q family of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in order to meet the rigorous standards set by those industries.

Coming pin-compatible with their commercial equivalent for seamless migration, these new FPGA chips are fully tested and qualified for working in extreme temperatures, the Virtex-6Q also using a ruggedized plastic packaging in order to protect it against caustic processes.

This makes it particularly well suited for being used for applications that need high levels of performance and logic density up to the full military temperature range such as avionics while the Spartan-6Q is designed to be used in the targeting systems packed inside missiles and munitions.

Compared to the previous version, Xilinx says the Virtex-6 FPGA family delivers 50% lower power and 20% lower cost thanks to their third-generation Xilinx ASMBL architecture.

"The introduction of the first defense-grade Spartan family into the Xilinx Aerospace and Defense product portfolio builds on the Virtex series' long success supporting systems that drive mission-critical defense and aerospace electronics," said Harvey Steele, Vice President, Segment Marketing at Xilinx.

"The secure, low-power Spartan-6Q devices, as well as our recently-announced rad-hard Virtex-5QV device, further demonstrate Xilinx's commitment and capabilities toward meeting the stringent requirements of aerospace and defense applications."

The Spartan-6Q Family and Virtex-6Q family FPGA chips will be available in an industrial temperature version (-40 to 100 C) as well as Q and M-temperature devices (Q: -40 to 125 C, M: -55 to 125 C) in the second quarter of 2011.

Although they say these FPGA chips are actually “low cost” solutions, Xilinx has not provided us with any info regarding pricing this depending primarily on the quantity ordered.