Xilinx
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U.S. corporation Xilinx, Inc. Template:Nasdaq is the world's largest developer and manufacturer of the class of reconfigurable hardware chips known as Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Among its chief competitors are Altera, Lattice Semiconductor, Actel, Quicklogic and Atmel.
Technologies
Xilinx manufactures a wide range of FPGA and CPLD devices, for a broad range of applications. These products range from inexpensive devices for glue logic (e.g. Coolrunner I/II CPLD devices), to high end performance FPGAs such as the Virtex II, Virtex II Pro, and the new Virtex 4 series.
Xilinx also develops intellectual property (IP) for their devices. Known as IP cores, these predesigned HDL models allow designers to minimize time to market. These cores range from simple functions (such as BCD encoders, counters, etc) to complex systems (such as multi-gigabit networking cores and custom embedded microcontrollers.)
The Virtex II Pro and Virtex 4 series are of particular interest to system-on-a-chip SoC designers because they can include a hard IBM PowerPC 405 fixed core immersed within in the FPGA fabric. These designs are capable of running a regular embedded OS such as Linux and interfacing with custom VHDL logic.
External links
- Corporate website (http://www.xilinx.com)