Xilinx Named EE Times ACE Awards finalist for Design Team of the Year

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Xilinx, Inc. (Nasdaq: XLNX) today announced it has been named a finalist in the TechInsight's EE Times' Sixth Annual Creativity in Electronics (ACE) Awards (www.eetimes-ace.com) competition, honoring innovators who demonstrate electronics industry leadership. The company's global, multi-disciplinary design team has been named Design Team of the Year finalist for its flagship Virtex®-6 and Spartan® -6 FPGA-based Targeted Design Platforms.

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"The 2010 finalists represent the execution of forward-thinking technologies and creativity that captures the imagination of consumers, illustrating the influence that electronics and embedded design professionals have on today's culture," said Junko Yoshida, editor in chief at EE Times.

Winners will be named on April 27th during the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley. Awards are presented in 11 categories and judged by editors and a blue-ribbon panel of industry experts, comprised of the leading voices of academia, industry and Wall Street executives.

"It's a privilege to be named a finalist for this coveted industry award alongside such a distinguished list of companies," said Victor Peng, senior vice president of the programmable platforms development group. "Hundreds of engineers across eight Xilinx sites worldwide in silicon, software and IP development have contributed to this achievement, in keeping with a long-held tradition of technology innovation at Xilinx."

For most companies, bringing a single IC to market on the latest silicon process is a monumental achievement. In 2009, amid the worst economic downturn in modern history, the Xilinx platform engineering team took this challenge to a new level, simultaneously rolling out two flagship FPGA families – Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 – on the latest 40/45nm process technologies with UMC and Samsung.

In less than 24 months, the global, cross-functional Xilinx platform engineering team took an integrated approach to all aspects of programmable platform design, beginning with a common fabric architecture for both device families [6 LUT, DSP, BRAM (subset), similar memory interfaces and serial connectivity], and exploiting the benefits of Moore's Law with up to 12 layers of metal interconnect and 2.5 billion transistors.

Up front, the design team took into consideration diverse customer use models to build a set of balanced, system-level Targeted Design Platforms with a level of scalability and application specificity that would enable customers to speed time-to-market with more highly differentiated end products. Such an approach required cross functional teamwork across Xilinx to deliver five key elements:

• The IC design team adopted a consistent design methodology and verification requirements across sites as part of three design flows (custom digital, analog and RTL).  
• Tool development was tightly coupled with IC design and the team had to re-think its software development process to address distinct "personas" for an expanding customer base of hardware and software engineers with varying levels of FPGA and domain (embedded, DSP, connectivity) expertise and end market requirements.
• The IP teams were challenged to develop new IP and migrate legacy IP onto the Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 architectures.  The aggressive release targets called for a concurrent development process between IC design, software, and IP teams.  The efforts of the integrated team led to more IP being released at the Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 product launch than ever before in the history of the company.
• The Silicon Hardware and Applications team simplified the Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 development and evaluation board strategy by defining and building a set of base boards that are scalable by utilizing industry standard FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) connectors to add functionality via a broad ecosystem of daughter cards.
• Finally, all elements came together with the delivery of Targeted Reference Designs that combined all elements to enable customers to start designing quickly, enabled customers to quickly evaluate Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 capabilities, and provided the ability for customers to modify or extend the design to accelerated development of their end application.  Each Targeted Reference Design is fully tested to assure the highest quality customer experience out-of-the-box.  

Altogether, an integrated approach by the design team paid off with Targeted Design Platforms that set new industry benchmarks for ease-of-use as well as performance, power, price and density, meeting a diverse set of system-level requirements across multiple markets.

About Xilinx Targeted Design Platforms

Xilinx Targeted Design Platforms integrate the key elements design teams need to dramatically shorten development time and focus engineering resources on creating greater product differentiation. They remove the designer expertise barrier to FPGA adoption by automating much of the process and bundling all the elements needed to optimize system-on-chip (SoC) development when ASICs or ASSPs are not an option. Sophisticated reference designs, IP and an interactive interface enable both new and experienced FPGA users to achieve the best performance, lowest power, highest bandwidth, and feature utilization available in both the Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGA families.

For more information about Xilinx flagship Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGA-based Targeted Design Platforms, go to www.xilinx.com/6.

About EE Times Group (www.eetimesgroup.com)

EE Times Group, a division of United Business Media, is the global leader in media and marketing services for the electronics industry. It delivers results for the key influencers and decision makers involved in the design, development and commercialization of technology through our market leading brands. More than 1.1 million engineering professionals engage with the EE Times Network -- EE Times, TechOnline, DesignLines, and Embedded.com -- across the globe. The technology community comes to EE Times Group's market leading events to share, learn, discuss, and advance the critical issues and challenges facing the electronics industry. As well, EE Times Group provides end-to-end services ranging from next-generation marketing, integrated media and research.

About United Business Media Limited

United Business Media Limited focuses on two principal activities: worldwide information distribution, targeting and monitoring; and, the development and monetization of B2B communities and markets. UBM's businesses inform markets and serve professional commercial communities -- from doctors to game developers, from journalists to jewelry traders, from farmers to pharmacists -- with integrated events, online, print and business information products. UBM's 6,500 staff in more than 30 countries are organized into specialist teams that serve these communities, bringing buyers and sellers together, helping them to do business and their markets to work effectively and efficiently. For more information, go to www.ubm.com.

About Xilinx

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

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SOURCE Xilinx, Inc.