Xilinx Embedded PowerPC Solution Gains Significant Industry Adoption

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 8 -- Xilinx, Inc.  today announced shipment of over two million integrated PowerPC(TM) cores in Xilinx® Virtex(TM)-II Pro Platform FPGAs, surpassing a remarkable twenty-fold increase since first quarter 2004. This milestone underscores the rapid industry traction and continued success achieved with the Virtex-II Pro PowerPC solution across thousands of customers worldwide. Deployment of the next-generation Virtex-4 FX Platform optimized for high performance processing applications is accelerating industry-wide adoption of embedded PowerPC technology over a wide range of end markets.

"The success and widespread acceptance of the PowerPC-embedded Xilinx platform is a testament to the versatility and performance of the Power Architecture," stated Nigel Beck, vice president, Technology Marketing, IBM. "The adaptability of the Power Architecture, through technologies like FPGA and organizations like power.org, is benefiting new customers across a broad array of industries, in some of the world's most innovative and sophisticated systems."

Manufactured on proven 90-nanometer semiconductor technology, the Virtex-4 FX Platform features the industry's only dual 32-bit embedded PowerPC 405 processors running at up to 450 MHz and delivering over 700 Dhrystone MIPS each, while providing over three-fold performance advantage and one-eighth the power consumption compared to processors in competing FPGAs. In addition, embedded systems designers can achieve up to 20X increase in overall application-specific system performance relative to software only implementations by leveraging the innovative hardware acceleration capabilities of the Auxiliary Processor Unit (APU) controller in the Virtex-4 FX platform.

Industry Adoption

The immersed PowerPC processor solution from Xilinx is implemented in many different forms ranging from system management and control to sophisticated distributed multi-processing systems. Supported by a variety of industry standard operating systems, the Xilinx PowerPC solution enables embedded systems across a broad range of applications, including wired and wireless communications, homeland security, automotive, defense, scientific and medical imaging, as well as industrial test and measurement.

"The fact that the PowerPC 405 processor is closely coupled into the FPGA provides us the ability to quickly modify our design and more efficiently partition our system in terms of hardware and software functionality," said Darin Mishima, senior hardware design engineer at Spirent Communications. "Since we can easily migrate our existing Virtex-II Pro design forward to the Virtex-4 FX device family, we are able to increase both functionality and performance of our next generation network test equipment while reducing overall system cost."

"We use the processor in the Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 device in our Ethernet interface module to perform ARP cache ageing and other system management functions, resulting in a 30 percent reduction in the amount of logic cells required which substantially reduces the amount of Verilog required to implement our design. We also use the PowerPC cores to configure and update registers and RAM tables used in our high speed data path," stated Alex Henderson, chief technology officer of Anagran, manufacturer of IP Flow State Aware (FSA) routers.

About Xilinx Virtex Platform FPGAs and Embedded Solutions

The Xilinx Virtex family is the world's first and only FPGA product line to integrate PowerPC embedded technology. Providing designers the ability to easily develop, integrate and debug their entire embedded system, the award-winning Xilinx Platform Studio tool suite offers a fully integrated hardware/software development environment included in the Xilinx Embedded Development Kit.

The Xilinx embedded ecosystem also features an extensive library of intellectual property (over two hundred cores), internal and third party tools, and support for the most widely used operating systems. Designers can quickly and easily build systems utilizing a variety of cost-effective development platforms, including the new Xilinx ML403 board with the Virtex-4 FX12 device, and free examples such as the popular UltraController-II microcontroller reference design based on the PowerPC 405 core. Additionally, Xilinx provides a variety of embedded design services, training and support to further ensure first-time design success.

More information about Xilinx's complete spectrum of price-performance optimized processing solutions is available online: http://www.xilinx.com/products/design_resources/proc_central/index.htm .

About Xilinx

Xilinx, Inc. is the worldwide leader of programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.