Xilinx Delivers Small Form Factor SDR Development Platform in Collaboration with Lyrtech and Texas Instruments

Comprehensive development platform allows OEMs to rapidly develop and optimize radio designs for low power operation

SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIO FORUM, ORLANDO, Fla., November 13, 2006 – Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX), in collaboration with Lyrtech, Inc. and Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI), today announced the availability of a Small Form Factor (SFF) Software Defined Radio (SDR) Development Platform that allows OEMs to rapidly develop and optimize their radio designs for low power operation. The RF-to-baseband platform provides everything a designer needs to jumpstart radio waveform development, including complete hardware, operating software and middleware stack.

The SFF SDR Development Platform combines the industry’s first power optimization tool with miniature board size (6 inches x 5 inches) to reduce size, weight and power for mobile, handheld and SFF SDRs used in military, public safety and commercial radios. The development platform’s power optimization tool allows waveform developers to optimize total system power via iterative power measurements and re-partitioning of algorithms across the Xilinx® FPGAs and TI baseband processor. Lower power consumption can significantly extend the battery life of handheld and manpack radios, thereby reducing operating costs and the number of spare batteries required in the field.

“Power consumption is a major concern for software defined radio manufacturers,” said Ram Sathappan, SDR Marketing Manager at TI. “Our on-going collaboration with Lyrtech, Xilinx and a host of other third parties has resulted in a SDR development platform that helps solve power issues by empowering military and commercial SDR manufacturers with measurement and optimization tools that allow them to easily develop low-power radios and waveforms.”

SFF SDR Development Platform Features
The SFF SDR Development Platform is based on the Virtex™-4 SX35 and LX25 Platform FPGAs, TI DM6446 DSP baseband processor, TI ADS5500 analog-to-digital converter, TI DAC5687 digital-to-analog converter, and TI power management ICs. Xilinx ecosystem partner Lyrtech developed the base hardware platform and integrated all of the hardware and software. The hardware platform includes Virtex-4 XtremeDSP technology to implement the digital front-end (DFE) functions and wideband waveform processing, and TI DSP SoC technology to manage baseband processing and the SDR’s operating environment. The platform includes the digital processing module, data conversion module, RF module, and board support package with API and drivers.

“Xilinx, TI and Lyrtech have created an easy to use prototyping-to-production development platform that addresses radio size, weight, power and cost requirements, and enables developers to quickly bring small form factor software defined radios to market,” said Manuel Uhm, senior marketing manager for the DSP Division at Xilinx. “By supporting a model-based design flow and incorporating power measurements, we are lowering development costs at the application level and allowing developers to optimize for power by making educated decisions on waveform partitioning across processing devices.”

SCA Operating Environment & CORBA Middleware
The Software Communications Architecture (SCA) operating environment hosted on the SFF SDR Development Platform leverages software from several industry leaders: SCARI++ SCA core framework supplied by Communication Research Centre (CRC); INTEGRITY real-time operating system provided by Green Hills Software; and the ORBexpress CORBA ORB from Objective Interface Systems (OIS). Because of its ability to maximize waveform portability, CORBA has become the mandated middleware for the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program. The SFF SDR Development Platform is the first commercially available platform to CORBA-enable the GPP, DSP and FPGA.

Pricing & Availability
Pricing for the SFF SDR Development Platform starts at $2,900 and is dependent on configuration options. The Development Platform is available from Lyrtech and TI distributors. More information is available at www.xilinx.com/dsp/sffsdr.

About Xilinx
Xilinx, Inc. is the worldwide leader of programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.