With Spartan®-6 and Virtex®-6, there are more hard IP blocks. Hardened solutions are more efficient than any soft solution, allowing faster performance and lower power. Additionally, the hardened technology allows customers to use smaller size devices, hence allowing lower cost solutions. Several items were carefully chosen to deliver benefits to users and designed to maintain flexibility.  These hardened blocks are thoroughly documented, verified, and guaranteed performance which leads to lower risk and shorter design time. FPGAs are truly becoming a system-on-a-chip.