Marconi chooses Xilinx for next-gen synch digital hierarchy products.

Xilinx recently announced that Marconi, the European market leader in Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) selected XilinxVirtex-II Platform FPGAS for gigabit Ethernet traffic over its SONET & SDH products for optical network applications. The new generation of products offers service providers immediate improvements in core and metropolitan networks, as well as a flexible evolution path towards integrated optical networking. Time-to-market and flexibility were key factors in Marconi's choice of the Xilinx Virtex-II family over a typical ASIC solution.

"SDH is used in telecommunications networks throughout the ETSI-standard region, covering Europe, Asia Pacific, South America, the Middle East and Africa" said Alberto Mari, Data Interface product director at Marconi. "By using a reconfigurable solution in our next-generation products, we were able to speed up the development cycle and upgrade the functionality of the chip, which gave us a significant time-to-market and flexibility advantage."

"Virtex-II Platform FPGAs have the right combination of feature set and powerful development software that Marconi needed for their SDH technology," said Roberto Rosaia, area sales director for Southern Europe. "These are winning factors for Marconi as they strengthen their position in the optical networking market. We will continue to provide them with design flexibility benefits that will allow them to evolve SDH into the future."

The Xilinx Virtex-II Platform FPGA family delivers the highest performance and highest density of any programmable logic solution available. The innovative Virtex-II IP-Immersion architecture enables integration of both hard and soft intellectual property (IP), enhanced system memory, and lightning-fast DSP performance, providing the best platform for advanced digital designs in the industry. With densities ranging from 40,000 to eight million system gates, Virtex-II solutions are empowered by advanced design tools that reduce development time through fast design, powerful synthesis, smart implementation algorithms and efficient verification capabilities.

The industry's only online resource dedicated to designing products for the metro access networking (MAN) market, the Xilinx eSP MAN segment (http://www.xilinx.com/esp/optical) delivers an array of solutions and information in a single location. Users will find networking solutions ranging from specific reference designs to intellectual property resulting from collaboration with a wide range of industry leaders.