New Access To High-Volume Markets

In the past, PLDs were not cost-effective for high-volume applications in markets such as automotive and consumer electronics. Instead, those markets relied on customized devices commonly known as gate arrays. The high-volume market is a very different market than Xilinx's traditional high-end market. While performance, logic capacity and overall features are the ruling criteria for the customers in the high-end market, price is the most critical consideration for customers in the high-volume market. To compete effectively in this market, Xilinx has reduced the cost of our chips in two ways. First, we have significantly reduced the size of our chips through advancements in process technology. Secondly, we have streamlined our product offerings as well as the manufacturing, testing and packaging of our products. These cost reductions have enabled Xilinx to price its products competitively and capture high-volume market share. Our two key product offerings in this area are the Spartan family of FPGAs and the XC9500 family of Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLDs).