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As Xilinx says in its new Spartan 3E family of volatile FPGAs there are neither bells nor whistles, still it is the cheapest FPGA from this vendor. 100K gates FPGA shouls cost you about $2 in large quantities.
Another option is a nonvolatile ProAsic3 from Actel. They say it should sell for under $2 in volume for 100k gates devices. The problem is that Actel is not shipping the stuff yet.
FPGAs from other vendors ( Altera, Atmel, Lattice ) fall within more or less the same price range, so the factor which really may influence your choice is not the price. Try making your decission based on the development tools, internal architecture, supply voltages, availability, etc.
Here's the Xilinx selector guide:
**broken link removed**
The smallest Spartan-3 has 50K "system gates" and the smallest Spartan-3E has 100K, whatever that means. Number-of-gates is usually not the best way to specify FPGA size, so most Xilinx literature doesn't show it. Many folks have better luck estimating number of flip-flops or number of larger resources such as RAMs, multipliers and I/Os.
i had already check for xilinx spartan 3e and altera Cyclone II.
xilinx cost about 7.5e for 100k (xilinx italian reseller) and much more for less pieces.
altera cost about 10e (altera italian reseller).
actel (if i not wrong) is flash and not volatile.
i'm thinking to try EC3 from lattice, but not sure about the size, because it use FPU and not gates. 50k gates = xxx fpu?? italian persons can't give me an answer :O
In reality, you shouldn't make a comparison with gates or system gates.
I prefer the LUT4/register and memory comparison as this stands a lot closer to what you can achieve in the FPGA.
To give you a smal insight:
Xilinx' spartan3 XC3S50 compares more or less with the EC1 from Lattice, and no device from the current Altera offering.
The next density point XC3S200 compares with the EC3 (allthough less memory) and the EP1C3 (cyclone1) and no cyclone2 device yet.
The smallest Cyclone2 starts at the next density point EP2C5.
And so on...
Therefore the EC3 of Lattice is a lot bigger than your 50K gates.
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