Xilinx Embedded PowerPC Reference Design With Treck Software Delivers Gigabit Ethernet Performance

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- July 27, 2005 -- Xilinx, Inc. and Treck Incorporated today announced the general availability of the Xilinx® Gigabit System Reference Design (GSRD) with the award-winning Treck TCP/IP protocol stack. Leveraging the industry standard PowerPC(TM) processor embedded in the leading edge Xilinx Virtex(TM)-4 and Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGAs, the powerful combination of the Treck protocol software and Xilinx platform FPGA technology delivers TCP performance of over 910 Mbits transmit and over 400 Mbits receive, more than six times faster than any competing FPGA offering.

"With the undeniable trend toward Gigabit Ethernet requirements in almost every application, the GSRD solution with Treck provides a solution to easily get started," said Dr. Jerry Krasner, principal analyst for Embedded Market Forecasters. "Xilinx and their partners continue to raise the bar, and the fact that users can now get a high performance, off-the-shelf FPGA solution is immensely powerful."

Complete Customer Proven Solution

The Xilinx GSRD is a high-performance Gigabit Ethernet system design supporting both Gigabit and 10/100 Ethernet using Xilinx Virtex-4 FX or Virtex-II Pro FPGAs. It removes the processor-intense software copy and checksum computations to provide a high-performance bridge between Treck's TCP/IP stack and user-developed data interfaces. The proven GSRD solution is now available for download from the Xilinx website with over 500 hundred advanced registrations and multiple customer production designs underway.

"Our embedded TCP/IP protocol software is a strong complement to the Xilinx GSRD because of its true zero copy design and support for TCP checksum offloading in hardware," said Paul Martin, CEO of Treck Incorporated. "Packet copies and checksum computation are the two most processor intensive tasks that occur when processing network traffic, and our avoidance of these issues makes it the fastest protocol stack available on the GSRD platform."

Gigabit System Reference Design

The four main features of the GSRD hardware design consist of the embedded PowerPC 405 processor, Multi Port Memory Controller, Communication Direct Memory Access Controller and 10/100/1000 EMAC Peripheral. At the heart of the system is the PowerPC 405 processor that is used to terminate Treck's IP-based Internet protocols and process the headers of protocol packets without touching the payload.

The Multi Port Memory Controller allocates memory bandwidth between the PowerPC processor local bus interfaces and two data ports. This allows the processor a direct point-to-point connection to memory. Each data port is attached to the Communication Direct Memory Access Controller providing the 10/100/1000 EMAC peripheral high-bandwidth access to memory. The 10/100/1000 EMAC peripheral includes a LocalLink interface providing a point-to-point connection that is optimized for streaming communication applications. The 10/100/1000 EMAC peripheral can be configured to use either the Virtex-4 embedded Tri-Mode EMAC block or the soft Xilinx LogiCORE(TM) Tri-Mode EMAC. Both Tri-Mode EMACs have been certified by UNH for Ethernet compliance.

Utilizing an advanced memory controller and dedicated hard embedded blocks, the GSRD consumes significantly less FPGA resources than competing solutions while delivering the highest system bandwidth performance making it the ideal system architecture to build upon.

Treck Embedded TCP/IP Stack

The Treck TCP/IP stack provides high performance TCP/IP software ported to the PowerPC 405 processor. The stack can be used with or without an operating system and features zero-copy send and receive to deliver maximum throughput. The Treck stack supports GSRD hardware features for TCP/IP checksum offload and data re-alignment engines to provide further acceleration capability. Jumbo frames are also supported when used in conjunction with Gigabit Ethernet. Treck's TCP/IP stack implementation is fully RFC-compliant for interoperability.

Pricing & Availability

Now supported by the latest Xilinx Embedded Development Kit 7.1 release, the Gigabit System Reference Design and application notes are immediately available at no charge from http://www.xilinx.com/gsrd/ . The download includes an evaluation copy of the Treck TCP/IP stack delivered as a linkable library that provides full functionality for a limited period of time. The GSRD design runs on the Xilinx ML403, ML300 and ML310 Development Platforms. The ML403 is available now for order U.S. list priced at $495. The ML300 and ML310 are also available U.S. list priced at $4695 and $2495, respectively.

Information on all Xilinx embedded processing solutions is available online at 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.

About Treck Incorporated

Treck Incorporated designs and develops Internet protocol software for the embedded systems industry. Treck products are built from the ground up for embedded systems and are configurable for code size and performance requirements. Since the creation of the Treck TCP/IP stack in 1997, the company has maintained its focus creating easy to use, high performance, configurable protocols to help its customers make their devices the very best on the market. For more information, contact Treck Incorporated at (513) 528- 5732 or visit www.treck.com.