Foundation Series software incorporates advanced technology developed by Xilinx and strategic technology partners.  New in Foundation Series is Xilinx's M1 device implementation technology.  This new technology features advanced place-and-route software delivering incremental design capabilities.  These Xilinx-exclusive capabilities leverage results from previous design iterations and Xilinx's industry's best pin-locking capabilities to reduce runtimes and shorten design iterations to less than ten minutes. 

Xilinx recently announced a strategic partnership with Synopsys to fully integrate FPGA Express synthesis technology into Foundation Series.  The initial release of this technology, Foundation Express (October 1997), provides advanced architecture-specific synthesis and optimization capabilities to produce the highest quality of results for all Xilinx Designs. 

Xilinx IC technologies provide the best overall performance, density, and power in the industry.  Foundation Series provides complete software support for the 0.35-micron, 3.3V XC4000XL FPGA family and the Flash technology based XC9500 CPLD family, optimized for pin-locking and in-system programming (ISP) capabilities.