Xilinx announces roadmap for Virtex-II Pro Easypath

Company extends breakthrough cost reduction technology to world's most advanced FPGA

SAN JOSE, Calif., January 8, 2003 -Xilinx Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX), today unveiled its roadmap for the Virtex-II Pro™ EasyPath solution™, an extension of the highly successful Virtex-II Pro FPGA family. The highly anticipated Virtex-II Pro EasyPath solution, available in the second half of 2003, will provide a cost-reduction vehicle for a customer's Virtex-II Pro FPGA design without requiring any additional customer resources. Using the Xilinxâ Virtex-II EasyPath family, designers of today's complex systems can not only continue to build in Virtex-II Pro FPGAs as the critical element of their systems, but also take that flexibility into production with the Virtex-II Pro EasyPath solution at a cost savings of up to 80 percent. In addition, Xilinx can deliver the Virtex-II Pro EasyPath solution as a guaranteed performance match to the Virtex-II Pro FPGA in a fraction of the time required for traditional competing ASIC alternatives.

The Virtex-II Pro family, shipping since March 2002, leads the industry in density, performance, memory, DSP processing, embedded processing and value and is the world's first and only FPGA to offer integrated PowerPC microprocessor technology and 3.125 Gbps serial transceivers. Virtex-II Pro devices include these multiple PowerPC CPUs and multi-gigabit serial transceivers at no additional charge, providing unequaled capability and value for today's system design requirements.

"Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs allow a faster, easier, and more cost efficient development cycle for our high performance systems, thus reducing our development time and minimizing risk," said Dale Smith, president of Data Transit, a leading provider of analyzers for computer busses located in San Jose, Calif. "By combining all the critical system components such as microprocessors, memory, IP peripherals, and high speed I/O, Xilinx has developed an FPGA with big benefits for those of us who must support tomorrow's high speed busses before the standards are approved."

For applications in rapidly changing markets, many customers choose to use FPGAs in production and gain all the flexibility and advantages they offer. For some applications, where the design can be fixed, a focus on lower cost in production becomes important. Previously the transition from programmability in the development phase to profitability in the production phase involved high risk and valuable engineering resources using traditional ASIC technology. To address growing customer demand for a lower-cost alternative for high performance, high integration logic, Xilinx developed the Virtex-II Pro EasyPath family. Now, customers who want to take their designs into volume production with all the features and advantages of Virtex-II Pro but at a dramatically lower cost, can do so with the Virtex-II Pro EasyPath solution, without a costly and time-consuming ASIC conversion.

"This solution has been met with overwhelmingly positive feedback from our major customers," said Rich Sevcik, senior vice president and general manager of FPGA Products at Xilinx. "Customers can design with all the performance and high integration built into the Virtex-II Pro FPGA, then reap the cost savings benefits of the Virtex-II Pro EasyPath solution with no engineering resource allocation, and without risk normally associated with ASIC conversions. The Virtex-II Pro EasyPath devices are guaranteed to work exactly like the Virtex-II Pro FPGAs for that design."

About the Virtex-II Pro EasyPath Solution
In March of 2002, Xilinx unveiled the Virtex-II EasyPath solution, providing the same cost-reduction vehicle for Virtex-II FPGA customers. Because of this offering, designers had even more reason to use Virtex-II FPGAs compared to product offered by competing companies. The experience gained with Virtex-II EasyPath devices will now be applied to the Virtex-II Pro EasyPath solution.

Virtex-II Pro EasyPath devices are standard Virtex-II Pro FPGA circuits verified to meet the requirements of a specific customer application. Xilinx has created an innovative test methodology that leverages the reprogrammability of FPGAs to isolate and test all resources required of a specific design, based on data generated by Xilinx implementation tools. Xilinx creates a set of configuration patterns and test vectors specific to that design and combines them into a custom test program to validate the functionality of all required FPGA resources. The result is an application specific device that functions and performs identically to a Virtex-II Pro FPGA for the specific application. Because the Virtex-II Pro EasyPath device will implement the specific application in the exact same circuit as the original FPGA, a 100 percent match to the performance and functionality is guaranteed, without the need for a board or system re-verification or re-qualification. And because a custom test program is produced, without new custom silicon or a new verification process, production parts are available in weeks versus months.

Pricing and availability
With devices available in the second half of 2003, customers can begin planning design conversions today. Available for devices ranging from the XC2VP30 up to the XC2VP125, Xilinx Virtex-II Pro EasyPath devices provide production cost savings from 30 percent for low-density devices up to 80 percent for the largest Virtex-II Pro FPGAs.

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.

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