Xilinx (San Jose, Calif.) said its automotive Spartan-6 family, dubbed XA Spartan-6, includes FPGAs optimized for applications requiring high-speed connectivity and high-resolution video performance. These automotive-qualified devices provide the flexibility, scalability and integration needed to reduce the system cost of automotive infotainment, driver assistance, driver information, and in-vehicle networking products, according to the company.

XA Spartan-6 LX FPGAs offer up to 75,000 logic cells, 3.1Mbits of block RAM, 132 dedicated DSP slices for massive parallel processing at 250MHz, and support memory access rates of up to 800Mbps using integrated memory controllers, Xilinx said. The hard-coded memory controllers and increased memory capacity of these devices enable fast buffering of video frames, according to the firm.

Xilinx said it also offers XA Spartan-6 LXT FPGAs, with embedded 3.125Gbps low-power serial transceivers and PCI Express interface cores, suited for chip-to-chip communications in automotive infotainment systems and driver assistance applications.

Shipments of select XA Spartan-6 FPGAs will commence in the second half of this year, Xilinx said. All devices can be ordered in a variety densities and packaging options, the company said. Pricing information was not provided.

Later this year, Xilinx plans to introduce an infotainment companion chip targeted design platform, the company said.

The Spartan-6 industrial imaging targeted design platform is intended to accelerate development of high-performance video processing applications for low-cost, low-power industrial imaging systems. The platform includes the Spartan-6 industrial video processing kit, which provides easy access to the enhanced features, functions and larger device densities of the low-cost, low-power Spartan-6 family, Xilinx said.

The industrial video processing kit includes all the hardware and software needed to design right out of the box, including the Avnet Spartan-6 LX150T FPGA development board with two daughter cards based on the FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) specification, video and image processing soft IP, ISE Design Suite System Edition software, and four targeted reference designs, Xilinx said. It also features the Omnivision image sensor which provides direct support for real-time high-definition video streaming, according to the company.

Xilinx said its industrial automation targeted design platform accelerates development of real-time Ethernet networks. The company's industrial Ethernet kit includes the Avnet Spartan-6 LX150T FPGA development board and industrial networking daughter card based on the FMC specification, third-party evaluation EtherCAT core from Beckhoff, ISE Design Suite Embedded Edition and an EtherCAT targeted reference design, Xilinx said. Future add-ons for the Industrial Ethernet Kit will offer additional daughter cards and reference designs to enable faster time to market for designing factory automation applications, according to the company.

The Spartan-6 FPGA industrial Ethernet kit is available today in limited quantities from Xilinx's distribution partner, Avnet, with general availability in April, Xilinx said. The kit is priced at $1,895.