Home : Company Info & Press : Press Room : Press Releases : Xilinx Press Release #0430

Xilinx Press Release #0430

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New Xilinx ISE 6.2i Software Combined with Virtex-II Pro Devices
Results in the Highest FPGA Performance Advantage Ever

ISE 6.2i also enables 50% performance improvement of low-cost Spartan-3 family

SAN JOSE, Calif., February 23, 2004 — Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced version 6.2i of its Integrated Software Environment (ISE) - setting another software performance milestone for the programmable logic industry. New features and enhancements to ISE high-speed design tools enable Virtex-II Pro™ FPGAs to average 40% faster performance than the closest competitive offering at over 60% lower cost. The introduction of ISE 6.2i also boosts performance of Xilinx’s low-cost Spartan-3Ô family by up to 50% compared to the prior release.

When targeting Virtex-II Pro FPGAs, ISE 6.2i delivers a three device speed-grade advantage along with 15% better design utilization while maintaining a 2X overall runtime advantage. Xilinx customers will benefit from these results by getting access to the lowest system cost and highest system performance in the PLD industry. When using ISE 6.2i, Spartan-3’s platform features also include faster block RAM access speeds and embedded multipliers running at greater than 225 MHz. In addition, clock-to-output times are 35% to 40% faster than the prior release. These performance improvements combined with industry-leading cost metrics are propelling Spartan-3 FPGAs further into high volume applications, traditionally the domain of ASICs and ASSPs.

"Simply put, these latest FPGA performance milestones are due to Xilinx’s continued focus on leadership in state-of-the-art FPGA design tools," said Rich Sevcik, executive vice president of FPGA Products at Xilinx. "Design engineers require a complete, robust suite of software, silicon and service solutions to effectively solve their challenges. Xilinx is committed to providing complete solutions as shown in part by the long-term, continuous improvement and innovation in our software’s performance, features and ease-of-use."

Automated Tools for High-Speed Designs
ISE version 6.2i adds a host of new features and enhancements targeted for high speed designs which are seamlessly built into the easy-to-use, “push-button” methodology of ISE. For example, ProActive™ Timing Closure includes support for improved physical synthesis technology that automatically generates physically-correct, timing-driven implementations in a single pass. A new automatic hold time eliminator and improved delay estimator in the router work with the updated timing-driven mapper to automatically improve performance on highly packed designs. Each of these new features reduces overall design cycle time by eliminating time consuming design iterations.

ISE also automatically handles the external interfaces to Xilinx FPGAs. For example, automatic local clock placer support and enhanced constraints enable easy source synchronous memory interface design – for up to 96 low-skew 200MHz clocks with Virtex-II Pro and up to 50 166MHz memory interfaces with Spartan-3 devices. Also, the ISE floorplanner, pin planner, and timing-driven place and route automatically optimize paths to and from the 10Gbps serial I/O of Virtex-II Pro X devices.

"We are excited about the current development effort with Xilinx and our contribution to the strong performance of Virtex-II Pro devices,” said Ken McElvain, chief technical officer at Synplicity, Inc. "During the nine years we have been partners, our joint development effort has proven to yield great results for our customers."
"Mentor Graphics® collaborated with Xilinx to ensure tight integration
between Precision® Synthesis and ISE 6.2i, "said Simon Bloch, general manager
of Mentor Graphics design creation and synthesis division. "Our
long-standing partnership with Xilinx and support of the 6.2i software
environment will deliver significant performance and productivity advantages
to our customers."

Price, evaluation version, platform and availability
ISE 6.2i supports all leading-edge Xilinx product families including the company's Virtex-II Pro and Virtex-II Pro X 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 supports native Linux RedHat version 8.0 (including RedHat 7.3, 9.0 and Enterprise Edition 3). ISE Foundation and ISE Alliance also support Solaris. ISE is also available in the free downloadable ISE WebPACK configuration. Order a free, time-limited, full-featured evaluation version at www.xilinx.com. For more details on ISE please visit www.xilinx.com/ise.

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

###

#0430