SAN JOSE, Calif., April 19, 1999—Xilinx Inc., (NASDAQ: XLNX), today announced the expansion of the successful Xilinx DSP solution into million-gate, system level designs that use Virtex FPGAs. New third-party cores and development boards for Virtex FPGAs target voice over Internet, satellite and communications applications. Many of the new products will be showcased at the DSP World Spring Design Conference next week in Santa Clara, Calif. 

Available now from Xilinx third-party AllianceCORE partners are five new Virtex cores: HDLC controller and soft-decision Viterbi decoder from CAST, Inc., of Pomona, N.Y.; an ADPCM core from Integrated Silicon Systems of Belfast, Northern Ireland; and the XF-DVB-MOD, digital video broadcast (DVB) satellite modulator and XF-HDLC controller cores from Memec Design Services of Mesa, Ariz. 

"High-density FPGAs, like the Xilinx Virtex devices, have become significant in a number of DSP applications, often augmenting traditional DSP chips for very high bandwidth applications," said Will Strauss of DSP market watcher Forward Concepts (Tempe, AZ). "FPGAs offer not only flexibility and reconfigurability but can provide a great number of parallel operations that are impractical with traditional approaches." 

System-level DSP solutions

The new cores from AllianceCORE partners address needs in emerging and high-growth applications that often rely on evolving standards. These include: 

• Voice and fax over Internet applications that can use the ADPCM speech codec, Viterbi decoder, and HDLC controller cores.
• Digital enhanced cordless telecommunications (DECT) phones that can use the ADPCM core.
• Wireless LANs, digital cellular phones, set-top boxes and HDTV applications that can use the Viterbi decoder core.
• PBXs, packet networks, frame relay, ISDN and X.25 systems that can use the HDLC controller cores.
• Digital video broadcast via satellite and wireless microwave link equipment that can use the DVB satellite modulator core.

The Virtex DSP platform

High performance FPGA-based signal processing has become a reality thanks to features in Virtex devices such as special multiply-AND gates, DLLs, block RAMs, shift-register LUTs, and million gate densities. Clock speeds of 200MHz and more efficient HDL DSP design methodologies further extend DSP performance in Virtex FPGAs. Virtex devices also can use Xilinx Internet Reconfigurable Logic methodology to be partially or fully reprogrammed remotely over the Internet or over a wireless link to upgrade or change the DSP circuit design on the FPGA. 

"Virtex FPGAs are providing a boost to the high performance DSP market with added flexibility. They are gaining tremendous acceptance among DSP designers," said Babak Hedayati, program director for Core Solutions Marketing at Xilinx. "Today’s million gate Virtex devices are already capable of over 27 billion 16-bit multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations per second, and larger devices by the end of the year will enable 60 billion MACs per second—a hundred times more performance than the most powerful DSP processor available today." 

Complete Core Solutions

Xilinx and its partners are taking steps to provide total solutions for DSP and system designers. For example, the new GVA-220 and GVA-250 DSP prototyping platforms available from GV & Associates, of Ramona, Calif. support the Virtex, XC4000XLA and Spartan FPGA families. These platforms help designers prototype and validate DSP algorithms in Xilinx FPGAs. Basic DSP functions that form the building blocks of any DSP application are available in the IP Center, a new Xilinx Internet resource for intellectual property solutions and services. 

Product Availability

All products are available today directly from the AllianceCORE partners. For information on any of the products, visit the Xilinx web site at www.xilinx.com/ipcenter. 

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 commands more than half of the world market 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.