Xilinx Announces Up To 41 Percent Price Reductions on ISP CPLDs

Ann Duft
Xilinx, Inc.
(408) 879-4726
ann.duft@xilinx.com

Frankie Borison
Oak Ridge Public Relations
(408) 253-5042
frankie@oakridge.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

XILINX ANNOUNCES UP TO 41 PERCENT PRICE REDUCTIONS ON ISP CPLDS Price reductions place Xilinx as the price per macrocell leader SAN JOSE, Calif., September 2, 1997—Reaffirming its commitment to be the price leader for complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX) today announced further price reductions of up to 41 percent for selected XC9500 in-system programming (ISP) CPLDs. The new prices are effective immediately.

This price reduction is the third in nine months totaling up to 65 percent price reduction on XC9500 devices. The company said it has made significant strides in reducing manufacturing costs for the XC9500 devices with the aggressive Flash process migration and manufacturing improvements to allow Xilinx to pass further cost reductions on to the customers.

"Design wins for the XC9500 CPLDs are at an all-time high and have doubled from the last quarter," said Evert Wolsheimer, vice president and general manager of the Xilinx CPLD business unit. "We offer a clear price advantage in both absolute terms, but also in price per macrocell over our competition. The XC9500 family combined with the new Foundation and Alliance Series software is the most aggressively priced digital design solution."

NEW XILINX XC9500 PRICING

Device	Package	100-unit Price	Volume Price *	Price per macrocell
XC9536	44-pin VQFP	$3.05	$1.20	$0.033
XC9572	44-pin PLCC	$3.20	$ 1.85	$0.026
XC95108	84-pin PLCC	$8.05	$ 4.95	$0.046
XC95216	160-pin PQFP	$23.65	$15.70	$0.073
XC95288	208-pin HQFP	$65.50	$24.90	$0.086

*2H 98 "Further, when compared to prices currently offered on some simple PLDs (SPLDs), like 22V10 devices, the XC9500 devices are a more affordable solution for price and board real estate," continued Wolsheimer. "Three, 10-macrocell 22V10 devices for a total of $2.55 can be easily replaced by one Xilinx 36-macrocell XC9536 device for $1.20--less than half the cost. This solution and aggressive pricing should accelerate the decline of the SPLD market."

The Xilinx XC9500 ISP family, with logic densities ranging from 36 to 288 macrocells and speeds of five-nanosecond pin-to-pin operation, features a superior pin-locking solution, and support for industry-standard JTAG instructions for performing functional and interconnect tests of the chips on circuit boards. Many high-volume applications use Xilinx XC9500 CPLDs, such as add-in boards for PC peripherals, digital video disk (DV) cards, servers, telecommunication switches, routers, hubs, video games, and industrial controls.

Platforms, pricing and availability

Foundation Series 1.3 software is available for popular PC platforms and supports both the Windows 95, Windows NT operating systems. New Foundation Series pricing starts at $495. Alliance Series 1.3 software is available for both popular PC and workstation platforms and operating systems such as Windows 95, Windows NT and Sun OS, Solaris, HP-UX. New Alliance Series pricing starts at $495 on PCs and $3,995 on workstations. Evaluation software is available for both the Alliance and Foundation Series software for $99.

Founded in 1984, Xilinx is the world’s largest supplier of programmable logic solutions comprising industry leading device architectures and world-class design software. Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., the company pioneered the market for field programmable gate array (FPGA) semiconductor devices that provide high integration and quick time-to-market for electronic equipment manufacturers in the computer, peripherals, telecommunications, networking, industrial control, instrumentation, consumer electronics, and high reliability/military markets. For more information on Xilinx, access the World Wide Web site at www.xilinx.com.

—30— Xilinx is a registered trademark of Xilinx, Inc. All XC-prefix product designations, Foundation and Alliance are trademarks of Xilinx, Inc.
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