SAN JOSE, Calif., August 28, 2000—Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) announced today becoming a partner in the Wind River WindLink^TM Partners program, bringing together Real Time Operating System (RTOS)-level development tools and Xilinx® programmable logic devices (PLDs).   This combination will bring significant development and applications benefits for embedded systems designers using both Xilinx CPLD and FPGA families by greatly increasing the productivity of PLD designers, while enabling the creation of field upgradable applications.

“Wind River is committed to this partnership with the leading supplier in programmable logic,” said Curt Schacker, vice president of corporate marketing and business development at Wind River. “With Xilinx as a key member of the WindLink program, our customers can now target PLDs and bring all the flexibility benefits known to programmable logic to the popular Wind River tools. Combining programmable logic with RTOS environment provides a major productivity enhancement for digital logic users and opens new possibilities in system design.”

Xilinx will be demonstrating this concept, in Xilinx booth #5075 at Embedded Systems Conference 2000 in San Jose, using VxWorks and a demonstration board from UK-based Embedded Solutions Limited. The Internet Reconfigurable Logic^TM (IRL) demonstration will show reconfiguration over a network of ESL’s FPGA-based animation acceleration card by commands sent to the VxWorks RTOS. The logic running in the FPGA for this demonstration was written in ESL's Handel-C programming language and complied using the company's ConfigR toolkit.

“We're delighted to be working in partnership with Wind River and Xilinx to demonstrate the application benefits of IRL,” said Jon Treanor, President and CEO of ESL. "Our high level approach enables widely available programming skills to play a bigger role in product development and focuses teams on defining applications rather than overcoming issues of hardware complexity. The net effect is a reduction in time and cost to market over conventional methods by an order of magnitude." 

“Xilinx customers have been asking for tools and design methodologies which speed their time-to-market,” says Rich Sevcik, senior vice president and general manager of IP, service, and software at Xilinx. “As a member of the WindLink program, we will now be able to bring operating system-level design tools to both traditional users of PLDs as well a new class of firmware development engineers."

About the Wind River WindLink Partners Program

The WindLink Partner program is focused on helping hardware and software developers, system integrators, and consultants create and sell products and services that complement or are integrated with Wind River products. Wind River continually seeks out partners in strategic market segments such as Internet infrastructure, telecommunications, Internet appliances, consumer electronics, and semiconductors. WindLink partners work hand-in-hand with Wind River to provide total solutions to joint customers.

About ESL 

ESL reduces the time and cost of developing electronic products through new ways of working. Its system level design tools, services, and IP cores speed new applications to market and unlock the potential of electronic systems by enabling hardware reconfiguration. For more information, visit the ESL Web site at www.embeddedsol.com.

About Xilinx

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 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. 

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