First phase of multi-faceted initiative stems from dedicated technical divisions delivering targeted solutions to enable significant cost savings and flexibility for wireless base station designs
SAN JOSE, Calif., November 16, 2004 - Xilinx Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX), the world's leading programmable logic provider and inventor of the FPGA, today announced a company-wide initiative aimed at dramatically driving down wireless base station design costs, while increasing flexibility and complying with emerging industry standards. Building on a track record of success built over several years in base station applications, Xilinx has established a cross-organizational team focused on delivering silicon, IP, boards and software specifically tuned to wireless system requirements.
To kick off the initiative, Xilinx announced immediate availability of an OBSAI (Open Base Station Architecture Initiative) Reference Design, which is fully compliant with OBSAI RP3 (Reference Point 3) electrical and protocol specifications. This new baseband processing-to-radio module interconnect design is supported by the company's flagship Virtex-II Pro™ and Virtex-4™ FX platform FPGAs and represents the first of many easily customizable solutions Xilinx will deliver in the coming months as a result of its wireless base station initiative.
"OBSAI welcomes Xilinx support of the OBSAI RP3 interface specification, supporting the significant industry-wide design shift towards the adoption of a standardized solution for base station interconnect needs", said Jukka Klemettila, chairperson of OBSAI, "Standardized solutions will allow for much shorter product development time, helping to streamline product development costs and accelerate the delivery of next generation base station designs."
Market analysts indicate that the worldwide semiconductor market for wireless base stations is expected to grow from $2.7 billion in 2003 to $5.6 billion in 2008. According to Jordan Selburn, Principal Analyst at iSuppli, the FPGA/CPLD revenue portion of this segment is forecasted to increase from $222 million to $382 million. In 2003, the $27B total wireless base station market was dominated by Alcatel, Ericsson, Lucent, Motorola, Nokia, Nortel and Siemens, which represented nearly 80 percent of the revenues (Source: ABI Research).
More than 100 employees across Xilinx are engaged in the wireless base station initiative, with three independent business units - the Communications Technology, Digital Signal Processing and Embedded Processing Divisions - chartered with delivering platform solutions for multi-generational wireless applications.
"Xilinx is committed to enabling wireless base station designers to drive down costs while delivering the ultimate in flexibility by fully supporting the industry's migration to standards-based serial connectivity solutions, such as OBSAI," added Ray Johnson, general manager of the Xilinx Communications Technology Division. "Our strategy of creating customizable building blocks that can be integrated with high-speed serial interconnects will allow our customers to future-proof their designs by enabling field upgrades to support additional channels and services as needed, further enhancing cost savings."
About Xilinx Virtex Platform FPGAs
Xilinx Virtex™ FPGAs are the number one choice of designers worldwide, based upon their industry-leading capacity, performance, and cost-effectiveness. Virtex-II Pro was the world's first platform FPGA and only FPGA to offer integrated PowerPC™ embedded technology. Xilinx has shipped over 100,000 PowerPC cores to its customer base and enabled over 1,400 CoreConnect licenses.
Enabled by the revolutionary ASMBL (Advanced Silicon Modular Block) architecture, the company's new flagship Virtex-4 FPGAs deliver more options than any other FPGA family available today. With more than 100 technical innovations, the Virtex-4 family consists of 17 devices and three domain-optimized platforms: Virtex-4 LX FPGAs for logic-intensive designs, Virtex-4 SX FPGAs for high-performance signal processing, and Virtex-4 FX FPGAs for high-speed serial connectivity and embedded processing. A multi-platform approach makes it possible for customers to select the optimal mix of resources for their application to achieve the highest functionality and performance at the lowest cost.
Pricing and Availability
The OBSAI Reference Design is immediately available free of charge to qualified customers. Visit www.xilinx.com/OBSAI_Reference Design for more information.
About OBSAI
OBSAI comprises 110 industry leading telecommunications companies. OBSAI has created a set of open specifications to define a modular wireless base station architecture and detailed specifications for the three main internal interfaces. The aim of this initiative is to create an open market for base station modules and components to reduce development effort and cost, improve time to market, and accelerate the implementation of new and advanced services. For more information, visit www.obsai.org.
About Xilinx Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit
www.xilinx.com.
