"The Virtex-II architecture incorporates innovative circuit technologies that help address complex challenges in signal integrity, advanced clocking, and high-speed bus interfacing," said David Ayers, Switching Platforms and Technologies Vice President for Lucent Technologies.

"Virtex-II XCITE and DCM capabilities are enabling technologies for our next generation chip testers. These decrease component count and enable wider data busses critical for memory bandwidth." said Charles Nail, Principal Engineer at Credence Systems Corporation.

"I am impressed with the Virtex-II new Digital Controlled Impedance (DCI) I/O, Digital Frequency Synthesizer (DFS) and Digital Phase Shifter (DPS), the Advanced Interconnect Technology's buffered routing, and direct IOB support for dual data-rate (DDR) interfaces. The DFS and DPS will give us more clocking options, and the buffered routing will allow us to run faster logic internally, while the direct IOB support for DDR will help us meet today's growing need for higher interface speeds.

The DCI should significantly ease the pcb layout effort, and allow us to achieve higher board densities. "

Bob Walance, Hardware Engineer at Ixia

"The large number of global clock networks in the Virtex-II architecture has helped us to integrate more functionality into a single chip, without complicated clock tree analysis. The XCITE signal integrity technology allows us to develop our PCBs more quickly, by eliminating the need for many on-board resistors. The advanced features of the Virtex-II solution allows us to increase our engineering productivity." said Todd Nordby, Vice President of Systems Development at Latus Lightworks, Inc.

NMI (www.nmi.co.uk) sees the advent of Virtex-II as a major step forward in the provision of FPGAs with true system-level characteristics. Virtex-II not only has more logic resources, more memory and faster routing, it also incorporates sophisticated clock and impedance management. These latter features are just as fundamental to the design of real-world systems as raw logic and memory.

Kevin Heawood, NMI's Marketing Director, said, "We at NMI realize the impact that Virtex-II is going to have on system-on-an-FPGA designs and so we are already working on our next generation MicroEngine products based on Virtex-II. Along with our expanding IP library, these will allow us to deliver ever more complex solutions to our customers while retaining very short time to market".

"The availability of devices based on the Virtex-II architecture means that, for the first time, we have a platform that can make FPGA-SOC solutions a reality", said Kamiar Sehat, Director of Engineering at ARC Cores, a Xilinx AllianceCORE partner. "The incredible capacity of the Virtex-II devices with their large on-chip memories and embedded multipliers, enable us to provide very high performance configurable ARC processors with DSP extensions to our customers."

"The Virtex-II family will help us increase system reliability and reduce development time. The new XCITE digitally controlled impedance technology eliminates hundreds of impedance-matching resistors, which reduces component count and simplifies board layout," said Paul Bowden, principal engineer of Equipe Communications.

"Modelware sees the Virtex-II platform as a major advance that allows us to provide our high-speed 10 Gbps OC-192 communications products to programmable device users” said Anthony Dalleggio, co-founder, Modelware, Inc of Red Bank NJ. “The Virtex-II density, performance, sophisticated clock management features, and high-performance Select I/O are enabling factors for Modelware to provide advanced telecommunications virtual components.”