Company continues multi-faceted wireless initiative with additional solution aimed specifically at wireless base station applications
SAN JOSE, Calif., December 8, 2004 - Xilinx Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX), the world's leading programmable logic provider, today announced immediate availability of its CPRI (Common Public Radio Interface) Reference Design. The complete reference design provides designers with a digitized and serial internal base station interface for connecting Radio Equipment Control (REC) and Radio Equipment (RE) base station module blocks. Currently enabled by Xilinx Virtex-II Pro devices, the reference design will be supported by the latest family of Virtex-4 FX devices in the near future. Today's announcement supports the company's recently announced wireless initiative, developed to address the wireless industry's trend towards standardization of certain base stations features to lower costs, increase flexibility and shorten design cycles.
Market analysts indicate 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.
"Xilinx delivery of the industry's first CPRI-compliant reference design demonstrates our continued commitment to enable wireless base station designers to drive down costs while providing increased flexibility to support in-field upgrades for new services, standards and changing user requirements," said Ray Johnson, vice president and general manager of the Communications Technology Division at Xilinx. "We will continue to deliver leading-edge customizable building blocks to allow wireless base stations designers to cost-effectively future-proof their designs."
About Xilinx Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGAs
The Xilinx Virtex-II Pro family is the world's first and only FPGA to offer integrated PowerPC embedded 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.
About Xilinx Virtex-4 Platform FPGAs
Announced earlier this year, Xilinx Virtex-4 multi-platform FPGAs are the latest in the Virtex series of Platform FPGAs. Enabled by the revolutionary ASMBL (Advanced Silicon Modular Block) architecture, 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 Xilinx CPRI reference design includes VHDL source code, test bench and applications note describing a sample implementation. The CPRI-Compliant Reference Design using the Virtex-II Pro device is immediately available at no charge to qualified customers. For more information visit www.xilinx.com/cpri_rd.
About CPRI
CPRI is an industry cooperation aimed at defining a publicly available specification for the key internal interface of radio base stations between the REC and the RE. The parties cooperating to define the CPRI specification are Ericsson AB, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd, NEC Corporation, Nortel Networks SA and Siemens AG. For more information, visit www.cpri.info.
About Xilinx Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit
www.xilinx.com.
