EAST FISHKILL, N.Y. -- IBM Corp. today announced it will make available its most advanced copper-based chip processing technologies to Xilinx Inc. as part of a multi-million dollar, two-year foundry agreement to produce field-programmable gate arrays for the San Jose-based FPGA supplier.

IBM said the new manufacturing pact marks the first time it has agreed to make available 0.13- and 0.10-micron copper-based processes to a foundry customer. Until now, IBM has only used these technologies for its own microprocessors, custom ICs and memory products, according to the company's Microelectronics Division in East Fishkill.

Xilinx's new Virtex-II FPGAs will be fabricated at IBM facilities in Burlington, Vt., and East Fishkill under the new foundry agreement, which officials said culminated a two-year collaboration in technology development between the two companies. In the summer of 2000, Xilinx and IBM announced they would develop a "hybrid approach" to making custom chips with FPGA and PowerPC processor cores. That deal also included a foundry agreement (see July 25, 2000, story).

"Our collaboration enables us to serve a $5 billion opportunity and assures our customers a world-class source of supply," said Wim Roelandts, president and CEO at Xilinx. The San Jose-based programmable logic supplier has historically used leading-edge foundry services from Taiwan's United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), and it is unclear how today's announcement will impact that relationship.

UMC and IBM have partnered in development of compatible copper-interconnect processes under the "WorldLogic" alliance (see Jan. 27, 2000, story), but the Taiwan foundry company now plans to work with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to develop similar processes for the 0.10-micron technology node and 300-mm wafers under a PC microprocessor manufacturing partnership (see Feb. 1 story).

IBM is expanding its leading-edge foundry work with customers, like Xilinx, said Michel Mayer, general manager of IBM Microelectronics. "By fully integrating our PowerPC with Xilinx's FPGA chips, we've developed a new design and development model," he said. "Now, by optimizing those designs with our advanced manufacturing processes, we've developed a new performance and supply model."

The Virtex-II Pro products--with PowerPC and field-programmable FPGA--are aimed at communications, storage, and consumer systems applications.