Xilinx Press Release #02119

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

XILINX RALLIES INDUSTRY LEADERS TO BREAK THROUGH METRO AREA NETWORKING BOTTLENECK
Xilinx lays technology foundation to fuel fastest growing networking market segment

SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 25, 2002 - At the Metro Optical Networking Forum today, Xilinx, Inc., (NASDAQ:XLNX) unveiled its strategy to increase its penetration in the $23 billion dollar metro area networking (MAN) market*. Xilinx has determined, and industry observers agree, that increased demand for broadband services, virtual private networks and deployment of new services such as video on demand, will play a crucial role in a sustainable rebound of the current economic slump in the telecommunications sector. Xilinx' focus in the MAN market is designed to stimulate growth and address current "metro bottleneck" issues.

Metro bottleneck issues arising from the disparity in bandwidth between the corporate LAN and the WAN continue to fuel product development in this space. The challenge is that fiber optic rings circling major metropolitan areas were designed for voice traffic, and are now being used primarily for data traffic. Addressing this challenge requires the development and deployment of new equipment based on new and emerging standards, while simultaneously provisioning new services that demand advanced packet processing and traffic management technologies.

"We believe that breaking through the MAN bottleneck will be key to leading the telecommunications industry out of its current slump," said Wim Roelandts, president and chief executive officer at Xilinx. "We have aligned ourselves with industry leaders and developed unparalleled solutions to provide the foundation for alleviating this bottleneck and spurring new growth across the industry."

The combination of high performance and programmability make Xilinx solutions the ideal technology to bridge the gap between the LAN and WAN. Based on the industry's leading programmable FPGA architecture, the Virtex-II PRO supports an aggregated I/O bandwidth of up to 120 G/bs with core logic performance capable of supporting packet processing in excess of 100 million packets per second. The flexibility to accommodate design changes, even after deployment in the field, is key to catalyzing new MAN standards such as RPR and MEF as they continue to evolve.

Xilinx also offers a comprehensive suite of IP that provides current state of the art in technology for system level interfacing, including basic networking building blocks consisting of high performance memory controllers, layer 2 solutions, and high performance control plane management, such as the recently announced PCI Express, HyperTransport, and Rapid I/O cores.

Xilinx embarked on the first phase of its strategy earlier this year by rolling out a high-performance line of programmable chips with embedded IBM PowerPC processors. A suite of world-class development tools and operating systems including VxWorks and Linux from industry leaders WindRiver and MontaVista supports the PowerPC, the established leading microprocessor architecture in the MAN market.

Xilinx efforts culminated this week with the introduction of an online resource for MAN product development (www.xilinx.com/esp) and by teaming with industry leaders to produce the Metro Optical Networking Forum. Xilinx teamed with leading edge companies such as Allegro Networks to produce the industry's first event to address the challenges of designing products for the MAN market. "Fixing the last mile is a critical issue and today's forum will play an integral role in solving key issues and breaking down barriers," said Dave House, chief executive officer, president and chairman of Allegro Networks.

About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader of programmable logic solutions. Additional information about Xilinx can be found at http://www.xilinx.com.

Safe Harbor Statement: This release contains forward-looking statements and projections. Actual events and results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements and are subject to risks and uncertainties including the general health of global economies, the health of our end markets and our customers' end markets, our ability to penetrate the metro area networking market in a timely period and customer acceptance of Xilinx solutions