XILINX UNVEILS OPEN PROTOCOL INITIATIVE FOR SCALABLE SERIAL CONNECTIVITY.

Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX) has announced an open protocol initiative to accelerate the industry-wide transition from parallel to serial interconnect architectures. The initiative includes a link-layer protocol code named Aurora, ideally suited for moving data across point-to-point serial links at a baud rate of up to 50 Gbps. The protocol allows designers of next generation communication and computing systems to achieve higher connectivity performance while preserving software infrastructure investments. Xilinx will discuss the protocol in detail and demonstrate the protocol using Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs at Programmable World 2002.

"With parallel architectures limited in terms of bandwidth and pin counts, serial system interconnects are increasingly becoming the norm. What once was an exotic technology is now a key requirement", said Chuck Byers, Bell Labs Fellow, Supply Chain Networks, Lucent Technologies. "Aurora's bandwidth scalability is invaluable to telecom network element designers such as Lucent, since it allows us to tailor the interconnect bandwidth to the specific application need."

Aurora is the first protocol to provide a transparent interface to upper layers of proprietary or industry standard protocols, such as Ethernet or TCP/IP, allowing any data packet to be encapsulated and sent between chips, boards and boxes. Xilinx has discussed the protocol under non-disclosure agreements with several key customers, resulting in considerable interest. In the spirit of an open standard, the protocol has also been proposed to several industry standards bodies.

"With Xilinx FPGAs adopted more and more for system level integration, our customers have increasingly requested a silicon efficient and scalable serial connectivity protocol," said Rich Sevcik, senior vice president and general manager at Xilinx. "With the Aurora open protocol initiative, we invite other industry leaders to join us in creating innovative solutions for our mutual customers thereby helping them to achieve significant cost savings and faster time-to-market."

The Aurora link layer protocol uses gigabit serial technology at the physical layer and scales from 622 Mbps to 3.125 Gbps per physical channel. Further, Aurora can aggregate from one to sixteen physical channels together into channel bonded virtual links. A sixteen-channel link provides a baud rate of 50 Gbps and a maximum data transfer rate of 40 Gbps full duplex. With this flexibility Aurora can be scaled for chip-to-chip, board-to-board, chip-to-backplane and box-to-box interconnect using physical media such as copper or fiber. This scalability allows Aurora to optimally support a myriad of applications such as terabit routers and switches, remote access switches, HDTV broadcast systems, bladed servers and storage subsystems that require very high data transfer rates.

Programmable World 2002 is an industry event presented by IBM, Wind River Systems, Xilinx and a dozen other industry leaders. Over 8,000 system architects and design engineers are expected to participate in the free of charge event. A broad array of systems design topics will be discussed at the event, including high performance connectivity, digital signal processing, and processing solutions. The event will also offer 20 hours of technical training sessions as well as technical demonstrations and exhibits.