ACADEMIA

Xilinx today announced that its pioneering Virtex-4 FPGAs were named Ultimate Product of the Year at the EE Times Annual Creativity in Electronics (ACE) 2006 Award Gala, recognizing the electronics engineer's most innovative companies and breakthrough technologies. The award goes to the most significant product introduced in the last 12 months in each of seven categories. The Xilinx Virtex-4 FX platform FPGA earned top honors in the logic interface and programmable logic category for its "technical significance" and "likelihood of use" in the marketplace. Virtex-4 FX FPGAs were lauded for providing system designers with a single-chip platform optimized for high-performance processing and hd serial applications. This is the second-generation Virtex family with embedded processors and the only FPGA product line to integrate dual 32-bit embedded PowerPC 405 processor cores running up to 450MHz and delivering over 700 Dhrystone MIPS. Virtex-4 FX devices provide greater than a three-fold performance advantage over competitive offerings. "We are truly proud to have our Virtex-4 products receive the prestigious EE Times award," said Erich Goetting, vice president and general manager of the Advanced Product Group at Xilinx. "This industry recognition further validates that our domain-optimized approach of integrating key IP blocks across multiple product platforms delivers maximum value to designers. With our Virtex-4 FX devices, they can select the optimal mix of logic, embedded processing and connectivity resources to achieve the highest functionality at the lowest cost for their application." The control and data processing capabilities of the Virtex-4 FX platform -- along with the highest performance logic, digital signal processing features and high-bandwidth serial I/Os available in the these devices -- are ideally suited for a wide range of end markets. These include wired and wireless communications, homeland security and defense, automotive, scientific and medical imaging, industrial test and measurement, as well as servers and storage sub-systems, communication line cards and backplanes.