Abstract
Nowadays, the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is one of the most widely used components in the field of embedded system designs. Owing to its diverse advantages, it is used in the development of system on chip (SoC), Application Specified Integrated Circuits (ASICs), Reconfigurable ICs and Digital Signal Processors (DSPs). There are many vendors, which provide the FPGA with different capacities and functionalities. Xilinx Corporation is one of the major providers of FPGAs. The major families of Xilinx FPGA include Spartan, Virtex, Artix and Kintex. Each member of their family is different based on the capacity, features and capability to perform certain functions. In this paper, a technical survey about the Xilinx FPGA families is presented along with the technical analysis, which includes growth in capacity, clock rate, the suitability of an FPGA for a particular application. In the end, Open RISC-1200’s ALU circuit is implemented on the Spartan-3E family of FPGA and simulated using Xilinx ISE, to give an idea of implementation of the circuit on FPGA.