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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NEXT-GENERATION VIRTEX FAMILY FROM XILINX TO
TOP ONE BILLION
TRANSISTOR MARK
Moore's Law continues to propel programmable logic to new heights
of capacity and performance
SAN JOSE, Calif., September 15, 2003 - Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX)
today announced plans for it's next generation Virtex family. The
next generation family marks a major milestone in semiconductor
technology, representing a quantum leap in PLD device performance,
low cost, density, capacity, capability and design efficiency.
With over a billion transistors in a single device, the family will
deliver more than twice the system capacity and twice the performance
than existing devices. Enabled by the rapid technological pace set
by Moore's Law, the next generation family will feature transistor
gate oxide thickness of less than 20 Angstroms, channel lengths
of less than 70nm, operate from a 1.2V supply voltage, and utilize
more than 10 layers of high-density copper interconnect technology.
"Surpassing the one billion transistor mark, the largest members
of the next-generation Virtex family will be amongst the most complex
semiconductor devices in the industry," said Erich Goetting,
vice president and general manager of the Advanced Products Division
at Xilinx. "Because of Moore's Law, FPGA technology is uniquely
capable of offering the combination of integration and application-specific
architectural flexibility, thereby delivering increased performance
along with reduced board space, power, and cost to our customers."
Working in close partnership with its customers, Xilinx has designed
the new family to address customer's next generation system requirements,
while at the same time meeting design-time and system cost targets.
By co-developing software, intellectual property, and application
designs hand-in-hand with integrated circuit design, the new family
will provide customers with unprecedented performance, ease-of-use,
and cost-effectiveness. The next-generation devices includes over
100 key technical innovations and are targeted at applications ranging
from general-purpose logic applications to high speed serial connectivity,
DSP, and embedded processing applications.
"One of the often overlooked stories in the semiconductor industry
is that Moore's Law has been operating at both a horizontal and
vertical level. While much of the focus has been on the ever-shrinking
size of the transistors and interconnect in the horizontal dimension,
the rapidly increasing number and quality of vertical layers has
been every bit as important, especially to FPGA architectures,"
said Goetting, "The advances in the vertical dimension have
fundamentally enabled many of the on-chip connectivity breakthroughs
in our FPGA products and have provided dramatically increased interconnect
capability and performance. With our next generation devices, we're
riding the wave of Moore's Law once again to enable programmable
logic to re-write the 'rules' of the semiconductor industry."
Process Technology Leadership
The next generation Virtex family is the latest in a series of innovation
from Xilinx taking advantage of Moore's Law. Xilinx continues to
provide major cost advantages over competing solutions as the only
FPGA vendor to deliver products based on 300mm and 90nm manufacturing
technologies, building upon a formidable competitive advantage established
earlier this year with the announcement of the world's first 90nm
programmable FPGAs - the Spartan-3 family. Xilinx has sold over
3 million devices on 300mm wafers to date and is the largest purchaser
of 300mm wafers in the world. Xilinx joins the world's most successful
technology companies - such as Intel, Texas Instruments, UMC, and
IBM - in aggressively moving to 90nm process technology and beyond.
Built on Foundation of Virtex Series Success
The next generation Virtex Platform builds on the proven success
of over three generations of Virtex Series solutions. Since its
1998 introduction, the company has shipped over 10 million Virtex
devices. The Virtex family has generated over $2 billon in cumulative
revenue, significantly adding to Xilinx's record-breaking gains
in PLD market share. The Virtex Series is the most popular high
performance FPGA in the industry, with over 80 percent of the business
for FPGAs at 1.5V and below. This market segment share is more than
four times higher than the next closest competitor.
About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic
solutions. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.
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