SAN JOSE, Calif., September 13, 1999—XilinxÒ , Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX) today announced the addition of its QML-certified Virtex line of FPGAs to the company's QPRO family of products for the aerospace and defense market. 

The Virtex line of high performance FPGAs is the first family of programmable logic devices to offer up to one million system gates. Virtex QPROÔ products provide an off-the-shelf system-level ASIC solution for aerospace and defense customers, without the non-recurring engineering costs, long prototype cycles and minimum volumes required for custom ASICs. 

"The unique features of Virtex FPGAs also provide a distinct supply chain advantage by alleviating the problem of product obsolescence that our customers face continually," said Howard Bogrow, marketing manager for Aerospace and Defense products at Xilinx. "Unparalleled density, high performance, system-level capability, SelectI/OÔ capability, and remote reconfiguration enable designers to incorporate the functions of numerous obsolete parts, standard or custom, into a single Virtex device. In addition, the availability of a wide range of predefined and tested reusable IP cores for Virtex devices makes these FPGAs an even more powerful solution. The addition of Virtex FPGAs to our QPRO product portfolio reinforces our long term commitment to serving the aerospace and defense market and helping our customers solve both their technical and supply chain issues." 

As standard products, Xilinx Virtex FPGAs meet the growing demand by the aerospace and defense market for "commercial, off-the-shelf" (COTS) products. 

"Xilinx FPGAs have always been COTS products in every sense of the definition and are available in ceramic or plastic packages for military temperature ranges, or to full SMD specifications," Bogrow said. "Unlike traditional custom ASICs, Xilinx products are commercially available from any of our franchised distributors." 

Also available from Eureka Technology of Los Altos, California, are several PowerPC peripheral cores for the QPRO Virtex devices. The cores include a PowerPC bus master and slave, PCI host bridge, bus arbiter, SDRAM controller, DMA controller and UART. The cores are silicon proven and are available now. 

"Many aerospace and defense systems require a military version of the PowerPC," said Simon Lau, president of Eureka Technology. "It has become exceedingly difficult to obtain the required peripherals for these designs, so we have developed core solutions that work in conjunction with the Xilinx QPRO Virtex devices. This provides designers with the capability to integrate the complete system core logic functions into a single Virtex chip. The use of IP cores allows designers to tailor the system functions to their specific requirements." 

Pricing and availability

The Xilinx QPRO Virtex FPGAs are available in the –4 speed grade and come in plastic and ceramic packages. Prices for 100-piece quantity are as low as $216 for the XQV100 in a PQ240 plastic package. 

Xilinx is one of fewer than 30 suppliers in the world to receive Qualified Manufacturer Listing, or QML. As a QML supplier, Xilinx is able to bring state-of-the-art, military grade products to market faster because the company’s world class processes and materials have been qualified in advance, eliminating the need to qualify individual products or production lots. Because of this, Xilinx is able to offer parallel availability of the latest, highest performance products to its commercial and aerospace and defense customers. Xilinx QPRO FPGAs are used in a wide variety of high integrity applications such as radars, missile guidance and targeting, electronic countermeasures and avionics. 

Xilinx has been serving the aerospace and defense market for more than a decade and provides customers with continuity of supply, specialized products and guaranteed mask and process controls that 

are unmatched by any other programmable logic manufacturer. The QPRO brand name reflects the Xilinx commitment to QML, performance, reliability of supply and off-the-shelf products. 

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.