Xilinx Press Release #02127

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAN JOSE, Calif., August 12, 2002 – Xilinx, Inc., (NASDAQ:XLNX) continued to outpace its competition in semiconductor performance and density with today’s announcement that it is shipping the world’s fastest, highest-density programmable chip available on the market. At eight million gates with clock speeds of over 400 MHz, and I/O speeds of 840 Mb/s, the Virtex-II Platform FPGA XC2V8000 is 73 percent larger than any competitive device available today.  

Xilinx Virtex-II Platform FPGAs deliver unprecedented logic, memory, and I/O capacity. The XC2V8000 FPGA includes 104,832 logic cells, over 3 megabits of block RAM, 12 Digital Clock Managers (DCMs), 168 18x18 multipliers, and 824 I/O pins, including 412 differential I/O pairs. 

On-chip memory resources, flexible and fast I/O and high performance logic have become increasingly important as a growing base of today’s system designers opt to use FPGAs rather than ASIC devices in their high performance applications.  The Virtex-II series FPGAs, with their abundant memory and 400+ MHz clock rates, are proven solutions for handling large data streams in terabit and pedabit routers, network port aggregation, and high-end broadcast equipment video imaging and computer graphics systems. 

Xilinx credits this breakthrough in Virtex-II performance and densities to a combination of advanced 0.15 CMOS process technology, jointly developed with fab partner UMC (NYSE:UMC), and electronic design automation software tools and methodologies tuned to maximize programmable chip performance.

“UMC played a fundamental role in helping Xilinx deliver this device into customer hands,” said Rich Sevcik, senior vice president and general manager of FPGA products at Xilinx. “Just as importantly, Xilinx and our EDA partners offer system designers a complete tool suite and methodologies that make it possible to fully exploit the device densities and performance of our Virtex-II platform FPGAS.” 

According to Ken Romano, director of Hardware Engineering for Photon Vision Systems (www.photon-vision.com), a leading supplier of CMOS Imaging Sensors and Single Chip Camera Systems for OEMs, “The reconfigurable nature of Xilinx Virtex-II FPGAs offer time-to-market and design flexibility we just couldn't achieve with a traditional ASIC or any other programmable logic vendor. The intuitive ISE software allowed us to optimize designs for specific customer solutions. The combination of first class software and state of the art silicon made our decision an easy one.”

Software before Silicon
A key advantage for Xilinx customers is that, with each release of the company’s ISE (Integrated Software Environment) software, customers are given early access to next-generation silicon architectures several months prior to device delivery. Consequently, Xilinx customers have already embarked upon new designs that leverage the power of XC2V8000, using the company’s proven programmable logic and system-level design methodologies. 

The latest version of Xilinx ISE software design environment, 4.2i, is tuned to maximize silicon and system performance. In fact, benchmarks of customer IP and core designs show ISE 4.2i delivers faster clock speeds than the nearest competitive offering. In addition, Xilinx ChipScope on-chip logic debugging software facilitates design verification of today’s multi-million gate FPGA designs, a feature not available using traditional ASIC technology. 

The same logic and memory fabric is available in the recently announced Xilinx Virtex-II Pro devices, when combined with ISE tools, deliver 25 percent faster performance than any available competing solution. ISE also offers ProActive Timing Closure technology delivering up to 3.125 gigabits per second I/O speeds, and partial reconfigurability—a first for the programmable logic industry.

Commitment to Higher Performance
In keeping with Xilinx’ commitment to significantly improve performance with each new version of software, designers of these high performance systems can look forward to even more impressive performance with the next generation of Xilinx ISE software scheduled for announcement later this month. 

About Xilinx Virtex-II Platform FPGAs
The Xilinx Virtex-II Platform FPGA family delivers the highest performance and highest density of any programmable logic solution available.  The innovative Virtex-II IP-Immersion architecture enables integration of both hard and soft intellectual property (IP), enhanced system memory, and lightning-fast DSP performance, providing the best platform for advanced digital designs in the industry.  With densities ranging from 40,000 to eight million-system gates, Virtex-II solutions are empowered by advanced design tools that reduce development time through fast design, powerful synthesis, smart implementation algorithms, and efficient verification capabilities.  

Pricing and Availability
The Xilinx XCV28000 is immediately available. Second half 2003 pricing for the XC2V8000 device is $3960 in volumes of 10,000 units.

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