Xilinx Enables Instant Deployment Of Aurora, Industry's Most Popular, Scalable, Lightweight Serial Connectivity Protocol

Latest Aurora Reference Design V2.2 From Xilinx Enables Most Efficient  Serial Point-to-Point Connectivity For Chip-to-Chip and Backplane Applications

SAN JOSE, California, December 9, 2004 - Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced the availability of FPGA-based Version 2.2 reference design cores for the high-speed serial I/O protocol Aurora. Specifically geared for Xilinx Virtex-II Pro™ X programmable solutions, the Aurora 2.2 release enables the widest range of chip-to-chip, backplane, box-to-box and board-to-board connectivity applications to communicate from 600 Mbps to 10 Gbps per lane. With the new Aurora 2.2 release (adding simplex mode and a streaming interface) Xilinx now has the most comprehensive set of solutions for Aurora, a scalable, lightweight, link-layer protocol that can be used to transmit data across point-to-point serial lanes while eliminating the resource inefficiencies of other serial protocols.

Aurora offers the industry's lightest core in comparable implementations, being two to four times smaller than the next competing solution. Further, the Aurora protocol's popularity has been surging with more than 4100 licenses to date and is used by designers for a diverse range of serial connectivity applications, including medical imaging equipment, wired and wireless infrastructure, broadcast communications systems, video servers, aerospace, aerospace and defense applications and industrial controllers.

According to Andy DeBaets, senior director, Systems and Application Engineering at Xilinx, "For many applications that require serial data transfer in only one direction, a duplex implementation is redundant and costlier than necessary. With the addition of simplex modules in the reference cores, customers can incorporate easier designs overall, efficiently implementing one-way serial transport with significant savings in logic resource utilization, as well as in interconnect and connector costs. More importantly, the use of Aurora with Xilinx Virtex-II Pro X FPGAs enables designers to efficiently meet stringent performance requirements with the flexibility of programmable devices and bandwidth scalability to future proof designs."

The new 2.2 release supports an additional word-based interface for data streaming in systems without frames. The streaming data interface with Aurora is extremely efficient both in terms of multi-gigabit data overhead and minimal logic usage in the fabric.

About the Aurora Protocol
Aurora is an open protocol, licensed at no cost, which can be implemented in any silicon device/technology including FPGAs, ASICs and ASSPs. It provides a transparent interface to the physical serial links, allowing easy use of the links for carrying data from proprietary or industry standard protocols such as Ethernet or TCP/IP. This leads to higher connectivity performance while preserving software infrastructure investment.

About the Aurora Reference Design Version 2.2
Xilinx CORE Generator™ delivers new, fully-parameterized Aurora reference designs that provide multi-lane 8B/10B channels with up to 10 Gbps per lane for a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro X device. The newest release of the Aurora reference design features simplex modules for one-way traffic, streaming interfaces for systems without frames, virtually unlimited bonded lanes with up to 10 Gbps per lane providing prodigious bandwidth scalability, optional native flow control and optional user flow control for data management. For more information, please visit www.xilinx.com/aurora.

Deliverables & Availability
All Aurora deliverables are available free of charge from the Xilinx web site at http://www.xilinx.com/aurora upon acceptance of a license agreement. These include the Aurora Protocol Specification, Aurora reference designs, Xilinx LocalLink Interface Specification and supporting demonstration designs for standard Xilinx development boards. The Aurora bus functional model is also available free of charge.

About Xilinx Virtex-II Pro X FPGAs
Xilinx Virtex-II Pro X FPGAs incorporate up to 20 RocketIO™ multi-gigabit transceivers, supporting operating ranges of 2.488 Gbps to 10.3125 Gbps per channel. Virtex-II Pro X FPGAs are the first programmable ICs that can directly drive optical transceiver OC-48 SONET compliant systems and support SONET implementation for OC-192 data rates and above. Virtex-II Pro X FPGAs also enable new applications, which require multiple high-speed serial channels each running at speeds up to 10.3125 Gbps, including popular bandwidth nodes such as 4.25 Gbps, 5 Gbps, and 6.25 Gbps. The 10 Gbps transceivers, when used in multiples, support effective bandwidths through the FPGA of more than 200 Gbps.

About the Xilinx Serial Tsunami Initiative
Today's announcement marks another milestone for the Xilinx "Serial Tsunami" initiative established to accelerate the industry's migration from parallel to high-speed serial I/O by delivering a new generation of connectivity solutions for system designers. In all, providing FPGA solutions for the Aurora protocol is compliant with making the Serial Tsunami vision a reality today. The trend toward high-speed serial connectivity is being driven by companies across a wide range of industries as a means to reduce system costs, simplify system design, and provide scalability to keep pace with current and future bandwidth requirements. Serial solutions will ultimately be deployed in nearly every aspect of every electronic product imaginable, from chip-to-chip interfacing, backplane connectivity and system boards to box-to-box communications.

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