Avnet Design Services, Xilinx Announce New Virtex-II Development Kit

Business Wire, May 1, 2002

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

PHOENIX & SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 1, 2002

Avnet Design Services (ADS), the technical arm of Avnet Electronics Marketing, and Xilinx Inc. (Nasdaq: XLNX), the leader in programmable logic, Wednesday announced a new development kit for Xilinx(R) Virtex-II(TM) FPGAs.

The development kit is a robust hardware platform that includes a high-capacity Virtex-II XC2V1500 or XC2V4000 FPGA, DDR-SDRAM memory, Flash memory, a PCI/PCI-X bus, and several Avnet Vertical expansion Bus (Avbus) connectors to provide all the components needed to quickly and easily create a complete system application.

Speeding Development Time

"Imagine if a designer could begin a design two weeks before the project starts. In many cases, that is the only way to reach aggressive time-to-market goals imposed by management," said Warren Miller, vice president of marketing, Avnet Design Services.

"The only way to achieve that two-week boost is to use engineering work that is already completed. Using a full featured development kit with a high-capacity FPGA and an extensive set of support components including memory, peripherals, bus interfaces and expansion connectors, can buy a designer a few critical weeks at the beginning of a design.

"Much of the FPGA development can take place on the development kit, allowing design to begin even before a hardware prototype is available," Miller added.

"This approach is most effective when the design requires the selection, integration or development of IP Cores. If the hardware platform contains the memory, interface and physical layer components required by the application, the usual set of false starts and dead ends at the beginning of a design can be avoided, saving even more time.

"Designers are finding that high-capacity FPGAs can be used to implement entire systems on a chip, but getting a design to market can be a very big challenge. The new Virtex-II development kit has a large Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA, memory, peripherals, bus interface and expansion connectors so designers can develop their prototype without the need to build a prototype printed circuit board," Miller said.

"Time to market is key to product success and the new development kit from Avnet Design Services will accelerate development time for designers using Xilinx Virtex-II FPGAs," said Sandeep Vij, vice president of worldwide marketing for Xilinx. "In particular, this kit will be very useful for designs based on the new Xilinx MicroBlaze soft processor IP Core and its rich peripheral set."

Kit Description

The Virtex-II development kit contains a printed circuit board, complete design documentation, demonstration programs, and a board support package to simplify application development.

Major hardware components on the board are the Xilinx XC2V1500 or XC2V4000 FPGA, 128MB of Micron DDR-SDRAM memory, 16MB of Flash memory, a PCI/PCI-X bus, and several Avnet Vertical expansion Bus (Avbus) connectors to allow the use of Avnet Design Services daughter cards.

The Virtex-II development kit with an XC2V4000 device can be ordered from Avnet Design Services as part number ADS-XLX-V2-DEV4000 and is priced at $2,500. Delivery time is two weeks. The Virtex-II development kit with an XC2V1500 device can be ordered from Avnet Design Services as part number ADS-XLX-V2-DEV and is priced at $1,000.

For more information on these or other ADS kits visit www.ads.avnet.com.

About Xilinx

Xilinx is the leading supplier of complete programmable logic solutions, including advanced integrated circuits, software design tools, predefined system functions delivered as intellectual property cores, and unparalleled field engineering support.

Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, Xilinx invented the field programmable gate array (FPGA) and fulfills more than half of the world demand for these devices today.

Xilinx solutions enable customers to reduce significantly the time required to develop products for the computer, peripheral, telecommunications, networking, industrial control, instrumentation, aerospace, defense, low power portable and consumer markets. For more information, visit the Xilinx Web site at www.xilinx.com.

About Avnet Design Services

Avnet Design Services is the technical arm of Avnet Electronics Marketing, providing a variety of technical resources and capabilities to speed customers' design cycles and to get their products to market quicker.

Field applications engineers (FAEs) are knowledgeable about a variety of potential applications solutions for customers' design problems and can guide engineers to the solution that is right for their particular applications. Fee-for-service engineering services, in FPGA, ASIC and System Design are offered to Avnet customers.

For more information, visit the Avnet Design Services Web site at http://www.ads.avnet.com.

About Avnet Electronics Marketing

Avnet Electronics Marketing (EM) is the largest operating group of Phoenix-based Avnet Inc. (NYSE: AVT), a Fortune 500 company with fiscal 2001 sales of $12.8 billion (year ended June 30, 2001).