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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
RAYTHEON CHOOSES XILINX TO DEVELOP
ENHANCED WIRELESS NETWORKING SYSTEM
Xilinx silicon, IP, and design services help
bring new MicroLite
communications system to market
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 28, Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX), the world's
leading programmable logic supplier, and the Raytheon Company, a
leader in defense and aerospace electronics, today announced a collaboration
that resulted in the successful development of Raytheon's new MicroLight
small form factor radio, hosting the Enhanced Position Reporting
System (EPLRS) waveform. Raytheon leveraged the technical expertise
of the Xilinx Design Services (XDS) team to augment its internal
design team with on-site support of specialized engineers. The high-performance
embedded processing capabilities of the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro Platform
FPGAs provided enhanced performance, lower power consumption, and
a smaller form factor than previous generation systems.
Through the combination of Xilinx design services expertise and
the flexibility of Xilinx silicon and IP, Raytheon delivered MicroLight,
a robust, high-speed, secure automated communications system, ahead
of schedule. Using the reconfigurable nature of Xilinx programmable
devices, the Raytheon MicroLight system can automatically reconfigure
itself to overcome the line-of-sight limitations of UHF communications
as well as jamming threats. The data communication and position
location-reporting and navigation functions of the EPLRS waveform
play an integral role in mission critical operations.
Xilinx Design Services Improve Time-to-Market
To further accelerate the development cycle, Raytheon leveraged
the Xilinx Titanium level Design Services, with dedicated Xilinx
applications engineers on site to improve productivity, increase
its own internal expertise, and produce the best possible design.
XDS and Raytheon combined their skills and experience in system,
logic and embedded software design to build a unique development
team. Utilizing the Xilinx ML300 Development Board, EDK with Platform
Studio and the Wind River VxWorks RTOS, Raytheon and Xilinx Titanium
engineers were able to quickly build and test in hardware subfunctions
of the overall system.
"We faced significant design challenges in developing this
next-generation system. With the help of the Xilinx Design Services
team we were able to fully leverage the high-performance features
of the Virtex II Pro Platform design environment," said Tushar
Patel Program Manager of Networked Communication Systems for Raytheon's
Integrated Communication Systems. "The design tool support
and IP integration capabilities were also a big part of our decision
and helped address many of our design challenges head-on."
Virtex-II Pro Platform approach enables integration, performance
Raytheon product developers chose Xilinx Virtex-II Pro Platform
FPGAs to meet stringent design requirements, including the ability
to quickly integrate a host of intellectual property (IP) cores.
Backward compatibility with earlier generation systems was also
critical, as was the ability to re-target Wind River operating system
code to a new processor.
The Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGA approach allowed Raytheon to include
hard and soft processor cores, custom logic and peripheral IP into
the most space efficient packaging possible while still using existing
application code. Integral to Raytheon's MicroLight system architecture
was the use of the Virtex-II Pro embedded IBM PowerPC core and the
Xilinx MicroBlaze soft processor core. The Xilinx MicroBlaze core
provided offload of cursory tasks from the PowerPC 405 processor,
allowing the overall clock frequency to remain low while significantly
decreasing power consumption. For rapid system integration of the
processor subsystems, Raytheon leveraged the fact that both MicroBlaze
and the integrated PowerPC core utilize a common industry standard
CoreConnect bus architecture. Particularly useful was the Xilinx
Embedded Design Kit (EDK) with the Xilinx Platform Studio IDE, which
facilitated key peripheral IP integration, such as 10/100 Ethernet
MAC, UART and the Reed Solomon Error Correction (all part of the
peripheral offering from Xilinx).
About Xilinx Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGAs and Embedded Solutions
Based on their industry-leading capacity, performance, and cost-effectiveness,
Xilinx Virtex™ FPGAs are the number one choice of designers
worldwide. The Xilinx Virtex-II Pro is the world's first and only
FPGA to offer integrated PowerPC embedded technology. Xilinx has
shipped over 100,000 PowerPC cores to its customer base and enabled
over 1,400 CoreConnect licenses. Xilinx offers a range of processor
cores both hard and soft for a wide range of either lower cost or
high performance applications.
Providing designers the ability to easily develop, integrate, and
debug their entire embedded system, Xilinx offers a fully integrated
hardware/software development environment, Platform Studio, included
in the Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK). The Xilinx embedded
system solution is comprised of an extensive library of IP (over
two hundred cores), application/reference designs, internal and
third party provided tools. Further ensuring first-time design success
with its Platform FPGAs, Xilinx provides a variety of embedded design
services, training and support.
About Xilinx Design Services
Xilinx Design Services augments customer design teams with industry
experts in FPGA design techniques and programmable logic solutions
such as systems architecture consulting, hardware engineering, and
embedded software design. Led by professionals with proven project
management skills, the XDS team of FPGA hardware engineers, embedded
software designers, signal integrity specialists, and system architects
help customers deliver products to market faster, more cost-effectively,
and with optimal performance. More information about Xilinx Design
Services is available at www.support.xilinx.com/xds.
About Raytheon
Raytheon Company, with 2003 sales of $18.1 billion, is an industry
leader in defense, government and commercial electronics, space,
information technology, technical services and business and special
mission aircraft. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon
employs 78,000 people worldwide.
About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic
solutions. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.
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