Avnet Electronics Marketing Introduces Low-Cost Evaluation Kit in Support of New Spartan-3E FPGA Family from Xilinx

Business Wire, March 2, 2005

PHOENIX -- Feature-rich Spartan-3E Evaluation Kit offered at $69

Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet Inc. (NYSE: AVT), today released the Xilinx Spartan(TM)-3E Evaluation Kit, providing designers with a powerful platform for developing high-volume consumer applications and for comparing the new Spartan-3E family to ASICs and ASSPs. The Spartan-3E FPGA family is the fourth family from Xilinx to utilize state-of-the-art 90nm process technology. Ranging from 100K to 1.6M system gates, the Spartan-3E family delivers the lowest cost per logic cell in the FPGA industry. The new Spartan-3E kit, developed by Avnet Design Services, features an XC3S100E -10 TQ144CES FPGA optimized for high gate count FPGA designs.

Spartan-3E devices include a host of features tuned for the consumer electronics market, including support for 18 common I/O standards including PCI 64/66, PCI-X 100, RSDS, and mini-LVDS as well as interfaces to commodity priced DDR memories. These built-in platform features reduce the need for other discrete devices, lowering overall system costs and simplifying design. The Spartan-3E family also lowers system costs by supporting commodity serial (SPI) and byte-wide, parallel flash memory for configuration, along with the Xilinx Platform Flash solution.

"Developing digital consumer applications requires an FPGA which offers both high gate counts and the absolute lowest cost," stated Jim Schaeffer, senior vice president of Avnet Design Services. "Engineers can leverage our Spartan-3E kit to maximize their market opportunity either in the highly competitive consumer electronics arena or as an alternative to ASICs or ASSPs."

"The Spartan family of devices has seen unparalleled acceptance by design engineers over the past several years," said Richard Terrill, senior manager of Spartan Series Solutions at Xilinx. "The new Spartan-3E Evaluation Kit from Avnet is a robust and extremely affordable tool that design engineers can use right away to start building designs with the new Spartan-3E family."

The Spartan-3E100 Evaluation Kit adds to Avnet's existing suite of five Xilinx Spartan-3-based kits. It will be followed by additional Spartan-3E kits with up to 1.2 million system gates. The Spartan-3E Evaluation Kit is available for purchase today. For more information, or to order a kit, contact an Avnet Electronics Marketing sales office or visit the Web at www.em.avnet.com/s3e100eval or register for the upcoming XLerated Solutions at seminar www.em.avnet.com/xleratedsolutions where the kit will be demonstrated.

Ordering part numbers and prices are:

ADS-XLX-SP3E-EVL100         With XC3S100E FPGA          $69

The Spartan-3E Evaluation Kit includes the following features:

XC3E100E -10 TQ144CES FPGA
Dual-character alpha numeric display
TI TPS75003 triple voltage regulator
ST Microelectronics SPI serial FLASH
Cypress USB 2.0

Documentation includes:
User's Guide
Bill of Materials

Schematics