Forrest Couch, Managing Editor Xcell@xilinx.com

And the Number Please...

What does the number 6,759,852 represent? Well, I guess it could represent a lot of different things. For example, it could be the current population of Chennai, India. It could be the phone number of Training Academy Ireland (they’re nice folks, but please don’t call them to verify). Or it could be the student ID number of a computer science major attending the University of Manitoba, Canada.

Had you chosen any one of these you would have been correct, but you would not have guessed the answer I was looking for.

On July 6, 2004, Xilinx reached the 1,000th patent landmark. The patent, “VDD Detection Path in Power-Up Circuit,” was U.S. Patent number 6,759,852. (I can’t believe you didn’t guess this.) It was issued to Maheen A. Samad in our General Products Division, Engineering department.

So what’s the big deal, you might ask? Although our corporate pride may runneth over, our patent count doesn’t hold a candle to some corporate giants. That may be true, but Xilinx was founded with innovation at its core, beginning with Ross Freeman’s invention of the FPGA and continuing with innovative practices and ideas, many of which are commemorated in the patent hallway at our corporate headquarters.

Using our R&D dollars as a metric to measure our efficiency in converting innovation into patents, Xilinx – as a high-tech company – ranks second only to IBM™. Xilinx also ranks 131st in the number of patents held, making it one of the most innovative companies worldwide. This milestone – while not hugely significant in terms of the raw number – is more about celebrating the continued innovation from Xilinx, both in the form of technology patterns as well as business acumen.

This issue of the Xcell Journal features articles in two key technology areas: digital signal processing (DSP) and embedded processors. This issue also includes an article on the new Virtex-4™ family of FPGAs, which offers three platforms optimized for logic, DSP, and embedded processor applications. And speaking of innovation, the Virtex-4 family includes more than 120 new (and, of course, patented) features, many of which are specific to supporting high-performance signal processing and embedded processors.

With the launch of the Virtex-4 multi-platform FPGA family, the Xilinx vision expands to encompass programmable systems, which include logic, embedded processing, and very high-performance digital signal processing. As illustrated in the many articles in this issue, programmable technologies provide customers further flexibility and performance benefits to inspire innovation.