San Jose, Calif., December 16, 1999-Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today introduced five newly available, very low cost prototyping and demonstration boards for Virtex customers to "test-drive" the industry's highest density FPGAs. Customers will now be able to demonstrate the Virtex feature set and verify their own designs in a real-world hardware setting before taking the devices into production. These new demo boards complement an existing suite of boards available from Xilinx distribution and third party partners that fulfill a broad spectrum of application, performance, and price requirements. Xilinx now supports the industry's most comprehensive offering of demonstration and prototyping boards. 

"Our customers can now perform emulation and design testing with our Virtex FPGAs at less than $500," said Bruce Weyer, senior director of marketing for the Xilinx High-End division. "Most demo boards start at over $1000, so this is a real reduction in necessary development costs. Using Xilinx demo boards facilitates quick design cycles. Customers don't have to spend valuable design time developing their own boards with these complete, easy-to-use packages." 

Each demo board accesses all of the advanced FPGA features including the SelectRAM™ and SelectI/O™ features, eight DLLs, and all global clocks. The boards have a large prototyping area to accommodate other ICs or engineering experiments. These streamlined boards have selectable V_CCO for each SelectI/O bank, independent V_CCINT and V_CCO power jacks, available oscillator socket for each clock input, and a Virtex configuration port for use with MultiLINX™ or parallel cables. The boards come complete with user guide, reference design, and all the tools and hardware necessary for immediate use. These boards are versatile enough to be used with today's Virtex and Virtex-E families, and are expected to be compatible with future families offered from Xilinx. The boards can be ordered directly through Xilinx sales, or can be ordered on-line through Xilinx® Xpresso Cafe™ . 

The new boards are available now and are currently priced between $400 and $500. Virtex devices are sold separately. 

In addition to the new low-cost demo boards, Xilinx devices are supported by over 15 boards from distribution and third party development partners for developing specific embedded systems and DSP, reconfigurable computing, and PCI applications. For example, Avnet Inc. Design Services and Insight Electronics, LLC, currently offer high performance Virtex verification and test boards for system-level development. Insight's newly introduced V100 demo board comes in a 32-bit PCI card format and includes the XCV100 Virtex device. Avnet's Virtex development system board includes an XCV300 FPGA. Go to www.xilinx.com for complete information on all Xilinx demo board offerings. 

The Virtex series consists of 20 members, from 50,000 to 3.2 million system gates, delivering performance and density attributes that were previously addressed only by ASIC solutions. Virtex devices are ideally suited for data communications, networking, telecom, and DSP applications. The Virtex series supports multiple I/O standards, clock signal synchronization, and multiple memory resources so users can reduce their overall design complexity, component count, and total system cost by utilizing the system integration features on Virtex devices. 

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 significantly reduce 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.