Yes. I had a talk with guys from Xilinx on the Electronica 2002 exhibition in Munich. In some words, Spartan III is a cheap version of Virtex II (in the same way as Spartan2 is a cheap version of Virtex).
They will start with production in the first half of 2003 with 0.9 and 0.65 um process. As far as I remember, they told that the biggest part will be 3S2000.
Yes. I had a talk with guys from Xilinx on the Electronica 2002 exhibition in Munich. In some words, Spartan III is a cheap version of Virtex II (in the same way as Spartan2 is a cheap version of Virtex).
They will start with production in the first half of 2003 with 0.9 and 0.65 um process. As far as I remember, they told that the biggest part will be 3S2000.
I also was wondering about .65 um.
Unfortunately, these guys on exhibition were just from the manager stuff, so they know near nothing about technical details. Looks like this technology will be used only in future to produce S3 parts.
Ace-X
P.S. BTW, following the Xilinx strategy the next generation after Spartan3 will be Spartan3 Pro as a cheap substitution of Virtex2Pro. It will have integrated 8-bit microprocessor (in contrary to PowerPC in V2Pro) and 10-Mbit Rocket I/O (as a substitution of 3.125 Gbps in V2Pro). Of course, it is just a joke!
Spartan III is the low price version of virtex II but it is geared to a different market.
Virtex II is geared to high-end applications that need embeded microprocessor and high speed communication. Spartan II is targeted to cost-sensitive applications that don't need microprocessors (as the PowerPC in the Virtex II family).
a big trouble whit spIII is that this device can drive hard the 3.3V, in fact the i/o was made to drive 2.5V.
I now that xilinx was correct this feature but for now there is a hgigh probability to carsh the device if we drive a 3.3V.