Xilinx to showcase India design strength at VLSI conference

INDIA: Xilinx India Technology Services Pvt Ltd, a subsidiary of Xilinx Inc., is a key participant at the 23rd International Conference on VLSI Design between January 5 and 7, 2010, in Bangalore.

With a rapidly-expanding design team in India and a strong reputation globally as leaders in complete programmable logic solutions, Xilinx is taking a leadership role in evangelizing Targeted Design Platforms to the industry.

Apart from the technology showcase, Xilinx is also chairing sessions such as on ‘Architectural Exploration and Design Closure’. Xilinx India’s CTO, Vamsi Boppana, is one of the leads on the program committee for the VLSI conference, with specific focus on the VLSI CAD stream.

Speaking about Xilinx’ participation in the conference, Boppana said: “It is an intrinsic characteristic of Xilinx to interact with professionals, students, our peers and the industry at large, and we believe that we are able to add value to the overall growth and direction of the industry and its many professionals. We are very excited about the VLSI conference 2010, and we are especially eager to showcase our India design strengths at this platform.”

Highlights of the Xilinx technology showcase at VLSI conference 2010 include:

Spartan-6 and Virtex-6 targeted reference designs for connectivity domain
* Targeted Design Platforms from Xilinx are aimed at providing customers with simpler and smarter design platforms for the creation of FPGA-based solutions in a variety of industries. The designs demonstrated are targeted to connectivity domain.
* Spartan-6 TRD demonstrates a fully functional network interface card developed using integrated blocks on Spartan-6 FPGA, Xilinx IP cores and third party IP core.
* Virtex-6 TRD demonstrates high speed (up to 10Gbps) movement of data between system memory and hardware using PCI Express.

Spartan-6 Air Graffiti demo
* This visual demo is based on SP601 board and is targeted to video domain.
* It captures live video and displays the same with the new Spartan-6 and Virtex-6 logos overlaid. It also captures and traces blue light via the camera input to enable 'air graffiti’.

Partial Reconfiguration demo
* This demo shows the basic steps of creating and implementing a design in PlanAhead. The design targets the ML-505 prototyping board. The FPGA drives LEDs in particular sequences depending on the reconfigurable modules loaded. The design contains two reconfigurable partitions, one with embedded BlockRAM and the other with embedded I/O buffers. Reconfiguring the various partitions drives the LEDs and I/Os differently.

Targeted Design Platform
The Xilinx targeted design platform strategy encompasses the integration of five key elements:

* New Xilinx Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGAs.
* Design environments supporting and integrating industry-proven methodologies.
* Scalable boards and kits adopting the industry standard FPGA Mezzanine Connector.
* Socketable intellectual property (IP) cores.
* Robust reference designs.

Each one of the elements, excluding the Xilinx FPGA device, is delivered by Xilinx or its third-party network and is supported by a robust ecosystem of design service expertise.

Targeted design platforms enable software and hardware designers alike to leverage open standards, common design methodologies, development tools, and run-time platforms. This allows designers to spend less time developing the infrastructure of an application and more time building differentiating features into the end application.