The company that leads in process by definition owns performance and density. The same company also has a large advantage in price. This is why process is crucial to Xilinx and our customers in the future.

Xilinx is committed to always having the most advanced process technology available. One of the major advantages of being a fabless semiconductor company is that we can tailor our fab partnerships in order to provide access to the leading edge fab processes.

This graph shows how processes have migrated from 1.2u in 1990 to 0.5u today while maintaining 5 volt logic levels. As the process geometry's shrink below 0.5u, the smallest transistors cannot withstand 5 volts without damage. This leads to the voltage staircase shown above, where each successive process generation must use a lower supply voltage than the previous generation.

In order to reap the benefits of increased performance, density, lower price and lower power dissipation, customers must be willing to migrate their designs down this voltage staircase. Xilinx is taking a lead in actively working with customers to help plan an orderly migration from one voltage standard to the next.

Another interesting fact is that our process technology partners recognize that FPGAs are ideal process drivers for a fab. The XC4062XL has 3x as many transistors as the Pentium PRO and being SRAM-based, it is easy to isolate defects and faults in the chip. This provides the fab with a useful diagnostic tool to improve the fab defect density while providing Xilinx with access to leading edge technology.

Note that Xilinx will continue to ship 5 volt devices, 3.3 volt devices and each new generation for some time on the order of 10 years. Although we encourage our customers to migrate their designs to lower voltage processes as they become available, we know that many designs will continue to run in production for many years on older processes and Xilinx is committed to supporting those designs.