Xilinx Ships Industry's First Complete DSP Solution with Support for RapidIO Interface

New solution solves bandwidth, performance and cost challenges for system designers

COMMUNICATIONS DESIGN CONFERENCE, SAN JOSE, Calif., September 23, 2002 - Xilinx, Inc., (NASDAQ:XLNX) today announced that its XtremeDSP™ solution now supports RapidIO, enabling system architects to overcome bottlenecks in high performance DSP systems. The solution leverages the DSP capabilities of the Xilinx™ Virtex™-II series FPGAs and supports the PHY and transport/logical layer of the RapidIO interface. Additionally, Xilinx is providing a new reference design demonstrating how the RapidIO interface operates with the IBM PowerPC processors embedded into the Virtex-II Pro FPGA. For complete information about Xilinx DSP solutions, visit www.xilinx.com/dsp.

"RapidIO technology is beginning to permeate the embedded DSP systems market and is especially applicable in areas such as military communications and commercial wireless infrastructure," said Lee Pucker, chief technology officer of Spectrum, USA. "Spectrum Signal Processing believes that the use of programmable logic, such as Xilinx Virtex-II series devices, is an important element in the creation of RapidIO-based switched fabric architectures. Spectrum is utilizing RapidIO technology in our SDR-3000 software defined radio transceiver subsystems."

RapidIO is a switched-fabric interconnect designed to operate at speeds exceeding 1.0 gigabits per second and support clock rates of 250 MHz. It addresses the requirement for more bandwidth and performance in DSP systems such as math intensive applications found in wireless infrastructure equipment.

While many leading suppliers of conventional DSP processors have announced plans to support RapidIO, Xilinx is currently the only company to ship a complete DSP platform with support for RapidIO. This complements the Xilinx connectivity IP portfolio which already includes support for most chip-to-chip, board-to-board and LAN/WAN/MAN/SAN standards. The Xilinx solution is the first DSP platform that includes processors, a high-performance DSP fabric, support for leading third-party system-level tools from The MathWorks and WindRiver Systems, DSP processing algorithms, and RapidIO connectivity. With the Xilinx solution, designers now have additional capabilities to remove processing bottlenecks using FPGAs for pre-processing to complement traditional DSP processors. Or the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs can be used for aggregating traffic between DSP processors to remove common connectivity bottlenecks.

Price and Availability
The price of the Xilinx RapidIO PHY core is $15,000, and $10,000 for the transport/logical layer core. The free reference design for Virtex-II Pro FPGAs is located on the Xilinx website at www.xilinx.com/dsp.

Xilinx XtremeDSP Initiative
The Xilinx XtremeDSP initiative introduced in 2000, driven by the broadband revolution, addresses the increasing need for high-performance DSP solutions. The initiative represents a major commitment by Xilinx to further establish its leadership as a high-performance DSP solutions provider. The Xilinx DSP solution comprises unique DSP features in its Virtex-II series FPGAs such as up to 556 embedded 18x18 multipliers, over 10 megabits block and distributed memory, pre-engineered DSP algorithms, system-level DSP development tools, and a rapidly growing network of Xilinx AllianceCORE™ and XPERT partners who provide DSP intellectual property cores and design services.

About Xilinx *
Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) is the worldwide leader of programmable logic solutions. Additional information about Xilinx is available at www.xilinx.com.