Xilinx Announces Fully-Compliant Reprogrammable 802.17 RPR Mac Solution

Complete solution facilitates design of highly flexible 1G, 2.5G and
10G metro access equipment

SAN JOSE , Calif., October 19, 2005 – At the Network Systems Design Conference today, Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX), announced the immediate availability of a free RPR MAC Reference Design for use with its Virtex™-4 family of domain-optimized FPGAs. The RPR MAC solution implements a complete RPR MAC supporting all key features of the IEEE 802.17 specification including MAC data path for east and west, Fairness, Topology, Protection, and OAM. Flexibility is provided through support for 1G, 2.5G and 10G rates, various PHY side interfaces (GMII, SPI-3, SPI-4.2, XAUI, and XGMII), memory interfaces, and a host of client interfaces. High availability is achieved via built-in functionality for equipment protection/redundancy. Xilinx will demonstrate the solution in booth #220 at the Network Systems Design Conference October 19-20, 2005.

“As IP traffic continues to increase with the growth of triple play services, so will the need for flexible and reliable infrastructure equipment to support this growth. RPR is a natural fit with its built-in efficiency and reliability and is gaining momentum in Metro transport/aggregation applications, particularly in Asia Pacific,” stated Ron Kline, research director for Optical Networks at Ovum-RHK. “ RPR equipment makes up the majority of the Ethernet Transport Device market which is forecasted to grow 49 percent cumulatively, reaching $1.3 billion by 2010.”

Banyan Networks-Broadband Division of Midas Communication Technologies Pvt. Ltd., based in Chennai, India, selected the Xilinx RPR MAC solution with a Virtex-4 LX FPGA for their new Next Generation DLC (ULC) RPR platform.“ While it was critical to comply to the IEEE 802.17 RPR standard, we also wanted to differentiate by implementing our own value-add features such as Strong QOS and circuit emulation and packet processing,” said R. Thirumurthy, head of the Research and Development department at Banyan Networks. “The Virtex-4 LX FPGA and RPR MAC Reference Design allowed us to integrate standards-based and proprietary functions all in a single device and provided us with the option of upgrading our design in the future. The solution also supported the different PHYs and rates supported in RPR. The high-speed 90nm fabric and integrated silicon features such as the Xtreme™ DSP slices and high-speed single-ended differential I/O gave our design the horsepower to support RPR designs up to 10G.”

About Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs
Named 2004 Product of the Year by Electronic Products Magazine, Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs deliver more options, higher performance and lower power than the other FPGA products currently available. Manufactured using the world’s first triple-oxide 90nm CMOS technology with 11-layer metal interconnect, Virtex-4 devices represent a significant advance in programmable device architecture, technology and system design capabilities. Go to www.xilinx.com/virtex4 for more information.

Pricing and Availability
The RPR MAC reference design is available free of charge at www.xilinx.com/esp/wired/rpr . The design package includes the design netlist, software drivers, and complete documentation including a compliance matrix.

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