Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs Are 38% Faster Than Competitive Offerings Using ISE 6.1i Design Tools.

Xilinx, Inc. (Nasdaq:XLNX) has announced new performance numbers for its leading-edge Virtex-II Pro family using Xilinx ISE 6.1i design tools. Recent benchmark tests confirm that designs using ISE 6.1i with Synplicity v7.3 Synplify on Virtex-II Pro FPGAs are on average 38 percent faster than the nearest competitive offering. This dramatic performance edge includes design compile times up to 2X faster than competitive offerings and provides customers with the advantage of over two additional speed grades. With Xilinx's software and silicon speed advantages, customers can now reach their design performance targets faster and lower overall design costs.

"ISE continues to demonstrate superior performance in programmable logic design," said Rich Sevcik, senior vice president of the Xilinx FPGA Products Group. "With two additional speed grades from superior software and silicon, PLD designers can save up to 60 percent on their overall logic costs by using Xilinx solutions. Our proven software and silicon leadership continues to accelerate the industry-wide transition from ASICs to FPGA technology."

Additionally, independent benchmark tests presented at the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) showed that Xilinx ISE Place and Route tools produce near-optimal timing-driven solutions. In the ICCAD paper on Optimality and Stability in Timing-Driven Placement Algorithms by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) 17 Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC), benchmarks demonstrated that Xilinx Place and Route tools came between 8.3 and 4.1 percent of the time-optimal solutions.

"As part of our placement optimality study, we generated a set of placement benchmark examples with known optimal solutions. Our study showed the Xilinx Place and Route tools produced consistently near-optimal timing results on Virtex-II Series devices," said Dr. Jason Cong, Professor of UCLA Computer Science Department, the faculty member who directed the research. "We believe the excellent placement timing results were achieved by employing advanced timing-driven placement algorithms with efficient exploitation of the segmented routing architecture used in the Virtex-II Series FPGAs." This is the first time a quantitative timing optimality study has been reported on any FPGA placement and routing tools.

ISE 6.1i supports all leading-edge Xilinx product families including the company's Virtex-II Pro Series FPGAs, Spartan-3 Series FPGAs, and CoolRunner-II CPLDs. All versions of ISE software packages support Windows 2000 and Windows XP and ISE Foundation, ISE Alliance, and ISE BaseX also support native Linux RedHat versions 7.3 and 8.0. ISE Foundation and ISE Alliance also support Solaris. ISE is also available in the free downloadable ISE WebPACK configuration.