Xilinx Press Release #0248

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 25, 2002—Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX), the leader in programmable logic solutions, announced today the Virtex-II EasyPath^TM family. The Virtex-II EasyPath solution, an extension of the highly successful Virtex-II series, provides a cost-reduction vehicle for a customer's Virtex-II^TM FPGA design without requiring any additional customer resource implementation. Using the XilinxÒ Virtex-II EasyPath family, designers of today's complex systems can not only continue to build in Virtex-II FPGAs as the critical element of their systems, but also take that flexibility into production with a Virtex-II EasyPath solution at a cost savings of up to 80 percent over using standard Virtex-II FPGAs. Moreover, Xilinx can deliver the Virtex-II EasyPath solution as a guaranteed performance match to the Virtex-II FPGA in about a fifth the time of competing conversion solution alternatives. 

Industry-wide success of the Virtex-II series

“Xilinx Virtex-II platform FPGAs provided an excellent system design platform for creating our new Dual High Definition, Dual Standard Definition, and ATSC-DVB I/O cards for our MediaStream Servers,” said Matt Klein, MediaStream Server system architect for Pinnacle Systems (Mountain View, Calif.), a manufacturer of Emmy award-winning digital video creation, storage, streaming and viewing solutions for broadcasters, video professionals and consumers. “The flexibility, ease of reconfiguration, and high performance architecture of Xilinx FPGAs allowed us to address multiple applications in a single device and provided a critical time to market advantage.”

Customer-driven development process

For applications in rapidly changing markets, many customers choose to use FPGAs in production and gain all the flexibility and advantages they offer. For some applications where the design can be fixed, a focus on lower cost in production becomes important. Until now the transition from programmability in the development phase to profitability in the production phase involved high risk and valuable engineering resources. To address growing customer demand for an alternative solution, Xilinx developed the Virtex-II EasyPath family, the only solution in the industry to take advantage of programmability in the design phase through to a risk-free path to production involving no customer engineering resources.

“This solution has been met with overwhelmingly positive feedback from our major customers. This value-based solution for Virtex-II designs gives our customers the best approach to total cost management,” said Rich Sevcik, Xilinx senior vice president of FPGA Products. “Customers can reap the immediate cost savings benefits of the Virtex-II EasyPath solution with absolutely no engineering resource allocation, and without risk.”

Innovative solution with 100 percent match to the performance and functionality—guaranteed

The Virtex-II EasyPath devices are standard Virtex-II FPGA circuits that are verified to meet the requirements of a specific customer application. Xilinx has created an innovative test methodology that leverages the re-programmability of FPGAs to isolate and test all resources required of a specific design, based on data generated by Xilinx implementation tools. Xilinx then creates a set of configuration patterns and test vectors that are combined into a custom test program that validates the functionality of all resources required by a specific customer design.

The result is an application specific device that functions and performs identically to an FPGA for the specific application. Because the Virtex-II EasyPath device implements the specific application in the exact same circuit as an FPGA device, a 100 percent match to the performance and functionality is guaranteed, and no board or system re-verification or re-qualification is necessary. Because a custom test program is produced, without new custom silicon or a new verification process, production parts are available in weeks versus months.

Pricing and availability

Virtex-II EasyPath solutions are available today for the four largest devices in the Virtex-II family. Because these devices do not require any custom silicon design, Xilinx plans to offer this solution for future FPGA families. The test process used for Virtex-II EasyPath solutions is easily portable to new silicon families and will be used for all high-density FPGAs from Xilinx in the future. 2004 high-volume pricing (15, 000 units) for the Virtex-II EasyPath solution for the XC2V3000^TM is less than $200.

About Xilinx

Xilinx is the leading supplier of complete programmable logic solutions, including advanced integrated circuits, software design tools, predefined system functions delivered as intellectual property cores, and unparalleled field engineering support. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, Calif., Xilinx invented the field programmable gate array (FPGA) and fulfills more than half of the world demand for these devices today. Xilinx solutions enable customers to reduce significantly the time required to develop products for the computer, peripheral, telecommunications, networking, industrial control, instrumentation, aerospace, defense, low-power portable and consumer markets. For more information, visit the Xilinx web site at www.xilinx.com. 

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Editorial Contact:	Product Marketing Contact:
Ann Duft	Steve Sharp
Xilinx, Inc.	Xilinx, Inc.
(408) 879-4726	(408) 879-4459
publicrelations@xilinx.com	steve.sharp@xilinx.com