Innovation, Education, Exploration

From Programmable World in 2003 to landing on Mars in 2004, Xilinx leads the industry in new products and new applications.

Xilinx products and services continue to expand the limits of possibility. We strive to make the best and most innovative products in the programmable logic industry – and deliver them as a complete solution that gives you everything you need to bring your product to market first. Here are a few of our innovations that may interest you.

Programmable World
On May 6, Xilinx launched Programmable World 2003 – a nine-month international initiative designed to help you understand and use the latest programmable logic solutions. It includes technical forums, exhibits, and workshops in dozens of cities around the world. By the time it ends in November, Programmable World 2003 will have reached more than 10,000 executives, system architects, engineers, and project managers worldwide. Co-sponsored by more than 30 industry leaders – including Agilent, Cadence, IBM, Intel, Texas Instruments, Mentor Graphics, and Wind River Systems – Programmable World 2003 started in North America, then went to Europe, on to China and Taiwan, and will finish in Japan and Korea in November.

Following the worldwide forums, which ended in August, we have been holding in-depth technical workshops, including multiple full-day courses on high-speed DSP, connectivity, processing, and system design.

At the Programmable World 2003 forum in Japan this summer, Dr. Tsugio Makimoto, chief technical officer of Sony, asserted that field programmability is “hitting its peak” from 1997 through 2007. Dr. Makimoto stated a second wave of digital consumer products will become the mainstay for future market expansion, just as personal computing products drove the first wave of the digital revolution. “Field programmability is a must in this new era of digital consumer goods,” Dr. Makimoto said. “These products have short time-to-market windows, and product life cycles that come quickly and end dramatically. Flexible, agile solutions are critical.”

Xilinx Goes to Mars
NASA recently launched two Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions, which depend on the most advanced, radiation-tolerant Virtex™ FPGAs in critical applications for both the landers and rover vehicles. The Spirit MER was launched June 10 and the Opportunity MER was launched July 7.

Chosen because of their reprogrammability and high densities, the Virtex FPGAs serve as the main brain of the motor control boards. These FPGAs will be used to control the pyrotechnic devices that will cushion the touchdown of the landers in January 2004. The Xilinx FPGAs will also direct the motor control functions on the rovers, including controllers for the wheels, steering, and antenna gimbals.

The radiation-tolerant Virtex devices on the two MER missions have up to one million system gates and total ionizing dose guaranteed to 100 kRads(si). We will soon announce a next-generation family of radiation-tolerant Virtex-II products with up to six million system gates and total ionizing dose guaranteed to 200 kRads(si).

RocketPHY
In May, we introduced our new RocketPHY™ stand-alone, SONET-compliant, 10 Gbps transceivers. These devices are among the industry’s first 10 Gbps products using CMOS process technology.

The RocketPHY transceivers are the first products from Xilinx that are not directly related to programmable logic devices, but they are designed to work with our FPGAs. These transceivers use the same high-speed I/O technology as our Virtex-II Pro™ X FPGAs in application-specific designs that solve many I/O challenges – at far less cost than any competing product in networking applications.

Conclusion
Xilinx continues to innovate in technology and penetrate new markets. Although our process technology, devices, and software are continually setting the highest standards for performance, quality, and reliability, we are also setting new standards in other critical areas that affect your life. You’ll find that our products, our support services, and our educational programs work together to bring you a cohesive, faster time to market, and lowest cost path to your next product introduction. There simply is no easier, faster, or lower cost way to develop flexible new products than with Xilinx silicon, software, and support.

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