Xilinx Announces Industry's Lowest Cost Programmable PCI Express Starter Kit

ESC Attendees Eligible for $100 Product Discount SAN JOSE, Calif. -- April 3, 2006 -- At the annual Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) today, Xilinx, Inc. today announced availability of the industry's lowest cost PCI Express Starter Kit. Fully compliant with PCI Express specification v1.1, the new kit is based on the company's low-cost family of Spartan(TM)-3 FPGAs and uses the PX1011A PHY (physical layer) from Philips and an optimized PCI Express IP core from the Xilinx LogiCORE(TM) portfolio to deliver a fully compliant PCI Express implementation. Product developers can now immediately deploy PCI Express capabilities for high-volume applications including add-in cards, host bus adapters, graphics cards and high-end servers. Xilinx is demonstrating its complete PCI Express solution April 3 - 7, 2006 in Booth #315, where show attendees can receive a $100 coupon off the list price of $349.

"PCI Express is now becoming the de facto standard in mainstream applications and developers need a low-cost, flexible approach to implement it. With our starter kit, they get the best of both worlds -- a full-featured PCI Express solution based on an extremely cost-effective and programmable platform," said Mark Aaldering, vice president of the Embedded Processing and IP Division at Xilinx. "Now it's faster and easier for designers to deploy PCI Express-compliant products with our low-cost Spartan-3 FPGAs."

PCI Express Starter Kit

The Xilinx PCI Express Starter Kit showcases a programmable PCI Express endpoint silicon solution which has successfully passed all the latest PCI Express compliance and interoperability tests. The two-chip solution, priced at less than $12.00 US in high volumes, is the industry's lowest cost programmable PCI Express solution to be added to the PCI-SIG PCI Express Integrators List and to demonstrate full compliance to the PCI Express 1.1 specification.

The starter kit consists of a reference board with a one-million gate Spartan-3 FPGA, the Philips PHY, DDR memory and Flash memory. It comes with evaluation versions of the Xilinx Integrated Software Environment (ISE(TM)) Foundation and Embedded Developer Kit (EDK) design software suites.

"Our companies have extensive experience and expertise with the PCI Express standard and are pleased to offer them in a combined solution for our mutual customers. With the availability of our robust PHY working in conjunction with the Xilinx LogiCORE IP and underlying Spartan-3 device, we can deliver the most competitively-priced and easy-to-use solution for design engineers," said Dhwani Vyas, general manager of Interface Products at Philips Semiconductors.

About the Programmable PCI Express Solution

This robust solution includes the Philips PCI Express PHY, delivering SERDES (serializer/deserializer) and Physical Coding Sub-Layer (PCS) capabilities and excellent bit rate performance. The Philips PHY consumes little power and features a small form factor that makes it ideal for ExpressCard applications. The Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA features an industry- leading combination of block and distributed RAM, up to 784 I/Os, MicroBlaze (TM) 32-bit RISC soft processors and embedded XtremeDSP(TM) functionality supporting multiply and accumulates (MAC) functions (dedicated 18x18 multipliers deliver up to 330 billion MACs per second).

Pricing and Availability

The PCI Express Starter Kit is priced at $349 and includes a limited time evaluation version of the Xilinx IP core. The PCI Express LogiCORE IP core is priced at $14,000 USD (one time charge), and is available at a discounted price of $5645 USD to registered attendees of the Avnet Speedway Workshops at ESC. For additional information on Xilinx workshops at ESC 2006 visit www.xilinx.com/events/tradeshows/esc_sv06/workshops.htm.

About Xilinx

Xilinx, Inc. is the worldwide leader of programmable logic solutions. Additional information about Xilinx is available at www.xilinx.com.