Spirent Communications Selects Xilinx Virtex-II Platform FPGAs for 40G Optical Transport Analyzer

Most powerful Xilinx FPGAs provide competitive advantage for performance analysis and service assurance leader

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 3, 2002, Xilinx Inc., (NASDAQ:XLNX) announced today that Spirent Communications, a wholly owned business group of Spirent plc (NYSE: SPM and LSE: SPT), developed the first totally integrated solution with OC-768 SONET framing and jitter testing for 40 Gigabit electrical and optical devices using Xilinx® Virtex-II™ Platform FPGAs. Spirent Communications recently earned two Best of Interop finalist honors in the test and measurement category and is among a growing number of next-generation networking companies to use Xilinx FPGAs in optical networking applications. The OTA 4400 with SONET framing will be demonstrated live at SUPERCOMM Conference in Atlanta from June 4-6 in booth #12017.

"There are several advantages of using an FPGA in leading edge optical test equipment and the Virtex-II device was the only FPGA with enough bandwidth and flexibility for our design," said Xavier Leleu, chief technology officer at Spirent Communications Optical Network Testing. "Xilinx FPGAs allowed our development team to implement an OC-768 SONET framer before any adequate ASIC was available and we can use the same platform to offer more features and support more standards in our next products, resulting in a much shorter development cycle. This provides Spirent, and in turn our customers, with a significant time-to-market advantage."

The FPGA-based Spirent OTA 4400 Optical Transport Analyzer is specifically designed to accelerate development and deployment of emerging high-speed optical networking systems at up to 43.2Gb/s. The OTA 4400 uses four six million-gate Virtex-II FPGAs to generate the OC-768 SONET framing and to process measured data. The flexibility of the Xilinx FPGAs will also allow the OTA 4400 to perform functions such as Packet over SONET (PoS), and Forward Error Correction (FEC) analysis.

"Xilinx Virtex-II and Virtex-II Pro products are a natural fit for optical networking applications such as those developed by Spirent," said Robert Bielby, senior director of Strategic Solutions Marketing at Xilinx. "Spirent's innovative products enable their customers to accelerate the development, deployment and assurance of next generation network equipment."

About Xilinx Virtex-II Platform FPGAs
The Virtex-II family, ranging from 40,000 up to eight million system gates, delivers the highest performance, highest density, and largest block RAM of any programmable solution available. It includes advanced system features such as digital clock management (DCM), high speed embedded 18X18 multipliers for XtremeDSP performance, and XCITE technology for improved signal integrity.

Metro-Optical Networking Forum
On July 25, 2002 in Santa Clara, Calif., Xilinx, along with other industry leaders, is hosting a free one-day event that will address the challenges of designing and developing products for metro area and edge access networks. Attendees of the Metro Optical Networking event will hear from industry experts on where this dynamic market is headed, technologies driving success in the MAN space, and see forward thinking solutions developed by cutting-edge companies. Charles Barry CTO at Luminous Networks will be presenting on 10Gb Ethernet vs. SONET from an RPR perspective. Locations and agenda information can be found at www.xilinx.com/metro.

About Spirent Communications
Spirent Communications is a worldwide provider of integrated performance analysis and service assurance systems for next-generation network technologies. Spirent's solutions accelerate the profitable development and deployment of network equipment and services by emulating real-world conditions in the lab and assuring end-to-end performance of large-scale networks. www.spirentcom.com

Spirent Communications is a wholly owned business group of Spirent plc, an international network technology company. Spirent plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange (ticker:SPT). The company is also listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker: SPM; CUSIP number: 84856M209).

About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader of programmable logic solutions. Additional information about Xilinx can be found at http://www.xilinx.com.