Xilinx Continues Record Fast 7 Series FPGA Product Rollout, Secures Over 200 Design Wins & Ships Thousands of Devices Worldwide

Xilinx fuels industry's highest bandwidth systems with high-end Virtex-7 FPGAs, meets aggressive cost/power requirements with Kintex-7 FPGAs 

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Oct. 24, 2011 -- Xilinx, Inc. today announced it has reached an industry milestone with over 200 design wins in just over six months for its newest line of 7 series FPGA (field programmable gate array) devices, which began shipping in March of this year. To date, the company has shipped thousands of Virtex®-7 and Kintex(TM)-7 FPGAs worldwide, addressing a diverse set of applications, ranging from high performance defense RADAR systems and next-generation 200G wired communication bridges to ultra-high resolution medical imaging equipment and cutting edge test and measurement equipment.

A formidable combination of market-tuned devices and unified 28nm architecture is enabling Xilinx to execute the PLD industry's fastest rollout. In addition to providing customers with access to 28nm technology in record time, Xilinx 7 series FPGAs address the universal requirement for the low power, while achieving the highest performance with an optimal combination of logic, DSP, and high speed serial channels.

"The PLD industry will continue to outperform semiconductor market growth, driven by increased customer demand in applications that have historically fell into the ASIC realm," said Jordan Selburn, principal analyst at market research firm iSuppli. "With each new node, PLDs can address more design sockets in an expanding range of end applications. By rolling out 28nm products ahead of the vast majority of their ASIC and ASSP competition, led by Xilinx in March 2011, PLD suppliers are poised to benefit significantly from this accelerating trend, and the industry is forecast to continue enjoying growth rates that exceed the semiconductor industry overall ."

"We are glad that we can help Xilinx achieve this milestone," added Jason Chen, TSMC Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Marketing. "This collaboration combines Xilinx's design expertise and TSMC's advanced technology platform to deliver great values to customers. We believe this tremendous synergy of strengths can create a win-win situation for Xilinx and its customers."

Xilinx is fueling the highest bandwidth systems with Virtex-7 FPGAs and meeting aggressive cost and power requirements with Kintex-7 FPGAs for wide range of applications in the fastest growing segment of the FPGA market. The remaining 7 series family - Artix(TM)-7 FPGAs - is on track for shipments in the first quarter of 2012.

"Since participating in the original Virtex development program over 12 years ago, our R&D team has counted on Xilinx FPGAs to design high resolution medical displays for diagnostic radiology," said John Beck, Principal Engineer, at Dome by NDS Surgical Imaging, a global leader at the forefront of innovation in medical imaging technology. "A combination of price, performance and low power consumption made Kintex-7 a good choice for our newest line of Dome S10 ten-megapixel medical displays for mammography. We were able to integrate two complete DisplayPort interfaces, IP also developed by Xilinx, which will take full advantage of Kintex-7 to deliver image viewing without compromise, addressing the need for both impeccable diagnostic quality, as well as the demands of the radiology environment."

Xilinx is offering three classes of 28nm FPGA devices and delivering on multiple industry firsts to meet today's market requirements. To dramatically lower power, Xilinx 7 series FPGAs are manufactured using TSMC's 28nm HPL (high-performance/low power) process. To increase customer productivity and shorten development time, 7 series FPGAs are built using a unified, scalable architecture for easy migration of 28nm designs between product families. Finally, to address customer demand for steep increases in capacity and system bandwidth, Xilinx is pushing the envelope with its 2.5D stacked silicon interconnect (SSI) technology to deliver the world's largest FPGA of all time this quarter: the 2M logic cell Virtex-7 2000T FPGA.

About Xilinx 7 Series FPGAs

Xilinx 7 series FPGAs are built on the industry's lowest power and only unified FPGA architecture that scales across low-cost and ultra high-end families. A shared architecture across the 7 series device families makes it possible for engineers to easily scale Kintex-7 FPGA-based designs down to the smallest Artix-7 FPGA and up to the largest Virtex-7 FPGA to support designs using a record 2 million logic cells.

All four Xilinx 28nm families - Artix-7, Kintex-7 and Virtex-7 FPGAs and Zynq(TM)-7000 EPP (Extensible Processing Platform) - are built on TSMC's 28nm high-performance/low-power (HPL) process. A high-k metal gate process, HPL is optimized for FPGAs, delivering the highest performance with the lowest total power consumption. For more information on the Xilinx 7 series family of FPGA devices and Xilinx 28nm Targeted Design Platforms, visit http://www.xilinx.com/innovation/7-series-fpgas.htm.

Artix-7 FPGAs deliver the lowest power and lowest cost to address high-volume markets. This family is one of three product families built on a common 28nm architecture designed for maximum power efficiency and offers over two times the capacity, 30 percent higher performance, 50 percent lower power consumption - and logic up to 350K logic cell density at lower price points than Spartan®-6 FPGAs. The Artix-7 family establishes a new standard for best cost for higher speed interfaces, including memories and transceivers. Artix-7 FPGAs further reduce system cost with the smallest footprint packages, leveraging wire bond chip-scale BGA technology.

Xilinx's award-winning Kintex-7 FPGA family represents a new category of programmable devices, offering high-end performance at less than half the price of the previous generation FPGAs at 40nm. Kintex-7 FPGAs deliver a 2X price-performance improvement while consuming 50 percent less power of previous generation devices, meeting the aggressive cost and power requirements of applications, ranging from high-definition 3-D flat panel displays and portable ultrasound monitors to broadcast video-on-demand systems and wireless base stations.

Serving the high-end of the 7 series device families, the Virtex-7 family takes the industry's most successful FPGA architecture to new levels by delivering 2X higher system capacity, 30 percent faster system performance, with 50 percent lower power than the previous generation. Virtex-7 FPGAs address a range of high-bandwidth applications, delivering the highest throughput for wired communications; highest signal processing for advanced wireless baseband processing systems; ultra-high digital signal performance for aerospace and defense infrastructure systems; and scalable, flexible, low-latency performance for broadcast systems. The 7 series family utilizes Stacked Silicon Interconnect technology to deploy the world's highest density 2 million logic cell FPGA, the Virtex-7 2000T device. Each 7 series device is built with a mix of features including dual 12-bit, 1 MSPS general purpose analog-to-digital converters, transceivers, DSP blocks, on-chip memory and much more.

Availability

The Virtex-7 XV485T FPGA, Kintex-7 K325T and K480T FPGA initial engineering samples are shipping now. The Virtex-7 2000T FPGA will begin initial sampling in the fourth quarter of 2011. Artix-7 FPGA initial samples will ship in the first quarter of 2012.

Customers can start designing today to take advantage of the price, performance, and low power consumption advantages offered by the 7 series FPGAs using ISE® 13.2 design suite. To download a full-featured 30-day evaluation version of ISE Design Suite 13 at no charge, go to http://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/ise-design-suite/index.htm. To learn more about 7 series, see www.xilinx.com/7.

About Xilinx

Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit http://www.xilinx.com/.