"The Virtex family is enjoying tremendous market acceptance," said Dennis Segers, vice president of  FPGA development and general manager of the High End FPGA Business Unit at Xilinx. "For the first time, customers have access to FPGAs with system-level features and up to one million system gates. This is fueling the demand for cores, which play a critical part in the success of large designs.  Our AllianceCORE partners recognize this opportunity, and they are choosing the Virtex family as the primary platform for developing new intellectual property." 

AllianceCORE partners report that cores previously designed for Xilinx XC4000 FPGA devices operate 25-30 percent faster when converted to run on Virtex devices. All of the new Virtex FPGA cores have been certified to ensure that they work within the Xilinx software design flow. 

"The Virtex family features a revolutionary FPGA architecture that is unmatched in the industry," said Timothy Smith, managing director of Memec Design Services. "It allows us to consider the development of FPGA cores that were not possible before." 
 
"The results we are seeing on Virtex FPGAs exceed our expectations," said James Doherty, CEO of Integrated Silicon Systems (ISS).  "Our first run of the ISS-designed DVB Reed-Solomon cores in Virtex devices resulted in an immediate performance improvement of about 28 percent. We expect to see even greater gains in performance by better leveraging some of the system-level features available in Virtex FPGAs." 

The new cores for Virtex FPGAs available now from AllianceCORE partners include: 

• CAST, Inc. of Pomona, New York, is supplying the C2910A micro-program Controller, the C2901 bit-slice unit, the C_UART compact universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter (UART) and the C8259A programmable interrupt controller. New from CAST is the X-DES cryptoprocessor core.

• CoreEl MicroSystems of Fremont, California, is supplying a new UTOPIA slave interface and a 10/100 Ethernet media access controller (MAC) core.

• Integrated Silicon Systems of Belfast, Northern Ireland, is supplying Reed Solomon encoder and decoder cores.

• Memec Design Services of Mesa, Arizona,  is supplying a Reed Solomon encoder core, and new IIC master and slave interface and Reed Solomon decoder cores.

• Virtual IP Group of Santa Clara, California, is supplying the M8254 timer/counter and M8255 programmable peripheral interface cores.

The Virtex family comprises nine devices that range in density from 50,000 to one million system gates and provide chip-to-chip performance of 200 MHz. The Virtex family features four, fully digital, delay locked loops for internal and external clock synchronization, a hierarchy of memory access, and SelectI/O technology for simultaneous interface to multiple voltage and signal standards. 

Combined with the Alliance Series and Foundation Series design software, Virtex FPGAs offer unprecedented system level integration capabilities. 

"The Virtex architecture is a natural for implementing IP," said Newton Abdalla, president of CAST, Inc. "The capabilities it provides to support system-on-a-FPGA design dramatically extend the boundaries of FPGA functionality." 

Virtex Improves Core Performance 

The Virtex family was developed to address system-level design on an FPGA. As a result, the combination of the device architecture and development software greatly simplify the process of designing and using cores. Third-party core providers experience improved performance with less need to optimize for the FPGA architecture. 

All cores are available for purchase today directly from the AllianceCORE partners in either Xilinx optimized netlist or source code formats. Pricing is available directly from AllianceCORE partners. Datasheets for each core can be found on the Xilinx web site. 

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 word 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. 

Xilinx is a registered trademark, and all XC-prefix product designations, Alliance, AllianceCORE, Foundation,  Select I/O and Virtex are trademarks of Xilinx, Inc. Other brands or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. 

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Mike Seither	Kathy Keenan
Xilinx, Inc.	Oak Ridge Public Relations
(408) 879-6557	(408) 253-5042
mike.seither@xilinx.com	kathy@oakridge.com