Xilinx Establishes Leadership Direction for High-Bandwidth I/O Technologies.

Business Editors/High Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 25, 2000

On tap are LDT, POS-PHY4, 3.125Gbit, Infiniband, XAUI, RapidIO, and

Fibre Channel for FPGAs; Virtex-II architecture to break 10 Gb/sec

barrier next year

Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX), the leader in programmable logic, today announced an aggressive plan to provide high-bandwidth interconnect technologies for its FPGAs that will break the critical 10 Gigabits per second (Gb/sec) bandwidth barrier within the next year. Users can anticipate implementing these high-bandwidth interconnect technologies in the next generation Virtex-II architecture.

High bandwidth interconnect technology is becoming increasingly necessary as FPGAs are used more and more as critical components in communications equipment. In addition to enabling much higher device performance, high bandwidth I/Os free-up package pins that were traditionally used as parallel I/Os. They also minimize switching related problems and drastically reduce power dissipation thereby enhancing device reliability in high bandwidth applications.

"The integration of very high bandwidth interconnects and the previously announced IBM PowerPC processor core within our Virtex-II architecture will offer customers the most flexible, fastest time-to-market development platform in the industry," said Dennis Segers, senior vice president and general manager of the Xilinx Advanced Products Group. "The Internet economy has accelerated the need for these high-bandwidth interconnect standards. The breadth of standards that will be supported by Xilinx will ensure that system architects have flexible solutions for their emerging networking applications."

The Xilinx direction includes physical layer support for the following popular high-bandwidth interconnect standards and applications:

-- Lightning Data Transport(TM) (LDT): A chip-to-chip interconnect that
provides much greater bandwidth per I/O. It can achieve a bandwidth from 6.4
Gb/sec per eight wire link width, and can support up to 32 links. Applications
include boards utilizing PCI and SIO, for example PC motherboards.

-- POS-PHY4 (PL4): A 13.3Gb/sec parallel link layer to physical layer interface
for packet and cell transfer over SONET for OC-192c and 10 Gb/sec Ethernet
applications. POS-PHY4 is a 16-bit point-to-point interconnect with 832 Mb/sec
per bit signaling utilizing double data rate clocking.

-- InfiniBand(TM): Promoted by an association comprising industry's leaders
such as, Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, the
focus is to develop a new common I/O specification to deliver a channel based,
switched fabric technology. The newly designed interconnect utilizes a 2.5
Gb/sec wire speed connection with one, four or twelve wire link widths.
Applications include remote storage devices and servers.

-- XAUI: A quad transceiver utilizing 3.125 Gb/sec serial links to create a 10
gigabit attachment unit interface (XAUI). Multiple XAUI interfaces can be
implemented to allow a single chip to interface to both 10 Gigabit Ethernet and
OC-192c.

-- Fibre Channel: A high-bandwidth serial standard offering 1.06 Gb/sec baud
rates scalable to 2.12 or 4.24 Gb/sec. Capable of carrying multiple existing
interface command sets, including Internet Protocol (IP), SCSI, IPI, HIPPI-FP,
and audio/video.

-- Gigabit Ethernet + 10 Gbit Ethernet: This includes devices compliant with
the IEEE 802.3 alliance. Applications include LANs and access and aggregation
equipment in the Internet edge space.

-- ATM (OC-12, OC-48, OC-192): This includes support for OC-12 (622 Mbps),
OC-48 (2.4 Gb/sec) and OC-192 (10Gb/sec). Applications include WANs, MANs, and
access and aggregation equipment in the Internet edge space.

-- RapidIO(TM) : A next-generation switched-fabric interconnect architecture
for embedded systems that is optimized for both high bandwidth and low latency.
Initial implementations are expected to exceed 1.0 Gb/sec throughput based on
clock rates from 250 MHz and higher. Applications will include embedded systems
in the networking, multimedia, storage and signal-processing sectors.

Integrated serialization and deserialization (SERDES) and clock and data recovery (CDR) are also included within Xilinx high-bandwidth interconnect technologies.

High-bandwidth I/Os have traditionally been developed using high performance processes such as gallium arsenide. By contrast, the Xilinx direction of its high-bandwidth interconnects will be developed using CMOS process technology. By using the established CMOS technology, Xilinx FPGAs can meet the performance requirements of the emerging high-bandwidth interconnect standards, while consuming much less power than solutions implemented in other process technologies.

"Interconnect bandwidth needs are outpacing Moore's Law relative to current I/O standards, so we anticipate a dramatic shift to the new, higher bandwidth interconnect technologies," said Bruce Weyer, senior marketing director of the Xilinx Advanced Products Group. "The flexibility of Xilinx FPGA architectures have proven to be an enabling technology for our customers as they transition to new standards."

Xilinx FPGAs are often used to translate differing I/O standards--a grand central station for I/O switching. System architects must integrate these I/O standards while maximizing performance and minimizing board real estate and cost. Xilinx FPGAs address this with support for 20 different I/O standards today. For example, Xilinx Virtex FPGAs support the SSTL I/O standard used in SDRAMs, the HSTL I/O standard used in SRAMs, the GTL+ I/O standard used in the backplane of Pentium-based systems, and LVDS, the I/O standard used in low EMI networking applications.

About Xilinx

Xilinx is the leading innovator of complete programmable logic solutions, including advanced integrated circuits, software design tools, predefined system functions delivered as cores, and unparalleled field engineering support. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, California, Xilinx invented the field programmable gate array (FPGA) and fulfills more than half of the world demand for these devices today. Xilinx solutions enable customers to reduce significantly the time required to develop products for the computer, peripheral, telecommunications, networking, industrial control, instrumentation, high-reliability/military, and consumer markets. For more information, visit the Xilinx web site at www.xilinx.com.