WEYBRIDGE, U.K. -- Marking a major milestone in the semiconductor industry, Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today unveiled a new family of programmable chips expected to propel programmable logic devices further into high-volume, low-cost applications traditionally served by custom chips with fixed architectures. With the new Spartan-3 family, Xilinx is leveraging both 90nm and 300mm advanced manufacturing technologies to achieve unprecedented density and price for field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). By setting a new FPGA price-density standard, Xilinx will be able to target a $23 billion total available market (TAM) and address new higher volume applications in the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) market. Xilinx's investment in the world’s most advanced 90nm and 300mm chip-making process with dual fabrication partners IBM (NYSE:IBM) and UMC (NYSE: UMC) has enabled the company to achieve an 80 percent chip-size reduction compared to competitive products on 130nm technology. With prices starting at under $3.50, Spartan-3 platform devices range from 50K to 5M system gates. Spartan-3 is the world’s lowest cost FPGA family, with pricing at under $20 for a one-million-gate FPGA and under $100 for a four-million-gate FPGA - a cost savings of up to 80 percent over competitive offerings. Already, Xilinx has shipped Spartan-3 devices to customers from both fabrication partners. “With today's announcement, Xilinx has completely changed the economic playing field for FPGAs, opening up a vast new market opportunity. Now, designers can afford to choose FPGAs over traditional custom devices for a broader set of cost-sensitive, high volume applications – and get to market faster,” said Wim Roelandts, CEO and president of Xilinx. “As traditional ASIC and ASSP design starts continue to decline, we expect that FPGA design starts using Spartan-3 will ultimately fuel higher growth for PLD makers."Xilinx Inc.