SAN JOSE, Calif., August 30, 1999—Xilinx Inc., (NASDAQ: XLNX) and CSELT S.p.A., of Torino, Italy, today announced the availability of eight new AllianceCORE products for use in Xilinx Virtex FPGAs. The new cores, developed, distributed and supported by CSELT, are aimed at a variety of ATM and telecommunications applications. 

CSELT is a new member of Xilinx AllianceCORE program of third-party intellectual property developers and is the research arm of Telecom Italia Group, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies. 

"CSELT’s cores mapped onto Xilinx FPGAs have allowed us to debug our innovative solutions for our new switching equipment," said Dr. Giovanni Cattaneo, product manager of BUCT, Switching Business Unit at Italtel, Milan, Italy. 

"The innovative Virtex architecture is perfect for designing high performance communications applications," said Dr. Luigi Licciardi, head of service management and forecasting systems at CSELT. "We utilized features like the true dual port BlockRAM in Virtex to design compact, high performance cores." 

"The Virtex architecture has enabled great strides in telecom, wireless, set-top box, HDTV, networking, Internet and high performance systems applications," said Mark Bowlby, marketing manager of AllianceCORE program at Xilinx. "The Virtex FPGAs, combined with CSELT’s telecommunications cores, provide tremendous time-to-market benefits for designers of communications systems." 

The new cores from CSELT can be used in a variety of networking, Internet, and communications applications. They include: 

• The UTOPIA level 2 transmitter and receiver cores for use in ATM physical layer devices—switches and routers, for example—to adapt internal protocols such as the RACE physical protocol, Pb, used by many European system manufacturers, to the UTOPIA standard. (RACE is the effort for Research and technology development in Advanced Communications technologies in Europe). 
• Distributed scrambler and descrambler cores, which are compliant to the ITU-T I.432 standard. These cores are ideally suited for use in routers, switches, and adapter cards in ATM cell based data-transmission applications.
• Convolutional encoder and Viterbi decoder cores for use in systems such as wireless LANs and digital cellular phones as well as target tracking and pattern recognition applications.
• The channel core, which is a test and development module that generates the noise typically found in communications systems. This core is ideal for use in FPGAs where the core can be included during hardware development and then removed when the system goes into production.
• The arbiter core, which can be used in systems that have multiple units using a shared resource such as a bus, where the core performs arbitration and priority assignment.

All cores are available today in Xilinx netlist formats. The cores can be purchased directly from CSELT. Data sheets for each core can be downloaded from the Xilinx IP Center, a comprehensive resource for system-level intellectual property and services. List prices for netlist versions of the cores range from $1,200 to $3,600, except for the Viterbi core, which has a list price of $8,000. Source code versions of each core are available from CSELT at extra cost. 

About CSELT S.p.A.  

CSELT S.p.A. is the Telecom Italia Group center for research, experimentation and qualification in the Telecommunications and Information Technology fields. CSELT contributes to the study of advanced systems and services for basic and applied research with a strong presence in the international and standardization contexts. CSELT provides a range of customizable soft intellectual property cores (VIP Library^TM) and design services in Information and Communications Technologies such as Fast Packet Switching (ATM, TCP/IP), multimedia and wireless systems. Additional information is available on the web at www.cselt.it 

About Xilinx 

Xilinx is the leading innovator of complete programmable logic solutions, including advanced integrated circuits, software design tools, predefined system functions delivered as cores, and unparalleled field engineering support. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, Calif., Xilinx invented the field programmable gate array (FPGA) and fulfills more than half of the world demand for these devices today. Xilinx solutions enable customers to reduce significantly the time required to develop products for the computer, peripheral, telecommunications, networking, industrial control, instrumentation, high-reliability/military, and consumer markets. For more information, visit the Xilinx web site at www.xilinx.com.