The chipmaker said on Monday that it has begun shipping its first new 90-nanometer field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips in small quantities. Xilinx is one of the first few chipmakers to start down the road toward the chipmaking milestone--mass production of the 90-nanometer chip.
Xilinx appears to be on track to mass producing the new programmable chips, which are often used in markets such as communications, where device standards aren't finalized yet. Programmable chips are more flexible than other chips--such as purpose-built chip--because companies can program them to do specific tasks.
Last December, the company and manufacturing partner IBM said it would ship test versions of the chip during the first quarter of 2003, and begin mass production in the second half of 2003. Moving to a smaller nanometer chipmaking process--such as from 130- to 90-nanometers as IBM is doing for Xilinx--produces smaller transistors and that are closer together inside a chip. This in turn allows manufacturers to put more transistors on a chip, boosting performance. The nanometer measurement refers to the average size of features inside chips, such as transistors and the interconnects that link them. A distance of 90 nanometers is about a thousandth of the width of a human hair.
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News source: ZDNet
