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Central to the new suite of solutions is the bundled suite of application- specific IP for Forward Error Correction. Offering a 60 percent cost savings* the FEC IP bundle enables quick implementation of WiMAX designs optimized for use with Xilinx high-performance Virtex(TM)-4 and Spartan(TM)-3 FPGA families. In a related announcement today, Xilinx and Wavesat, a fabless semiconductor developer of broadband wireless chips, unveiled a jointly developed WiMAX Mini-PCI Reference Design. The design provides a plug-and-play development platform designed to accelerate time-to-market for WiMAX equipment manufacturers.

Today's announcement builds upon the company's extensive experience in developing products for emerging wireless infrastructure protocols including 802.11, EDGE, WCDMA, HSDPA, TD-SCDMA and others. "WiMAX holds enormous potential and like other wireless protocols will benefit greatly from the flexibility, time-to-market, cost and performance advantages offered by FPGAs. For an emerging standard that will surely evolve over the coming months and years, rapid reprogrammability is essential," said Robert Bielby, senior director of vertical markets and partnerships at Xilinx. "Our solutions leverage our extensive experience and leadership in other wireless areas. By adding WiMAX specific technology we can continue to accelerate the proliferation of this exciting communications standard."

WiMAX Market Opportunity

Based on its ability to reduce costs and increase efficiency within the enterprise environment, analysts forecast significant growth for the WiMAX standard. According to Visant Strategies, the number of worldwide WiMAX users is expected to grow from virtually nothing in 2005 to 14.9 million users in 2009, creating over $13.8 billion dollars in service revenues from this segment. "We expect that WiMAX will become a predominant portion of the broadband wireless access market by 2009 because of the wide support it has achieved from leading equipment vendors," said Senior Analyst Andy Fuertes at Visant Strategies.

FPGAs Address Emerging WiMAX Market Requirements

WiMAX product development is an ideal match for the advantages of an FPGA approach. The programmability of FPGAs provides a proven future proofing strategy for developers having to deal with the rapidly evolving standard and product requirements. In addition, WiMAX applications are demanding from a performance and feature standpoint, and Platform FPGA offerings such as the Xilinx Virtex-4 and Spartan-3 families offer system-level solutions that include embedded processors, high performance DSP engines, and a full suite of customizable IP.

Pricing and Availability

The WiMAX FEC IP pack is immediately available and priced at US $19995. The bundle pricing represents a 60 percent discount over the price of the IP when purchased separately. Included in the FEC IP bundle is a convolutional turbo codec (CTC) encoder & decoder; turbo product codec (TPC) encoder & decoder; a Reed-Solomon encoder & decoder; and a high-speed convolutional (Viterbi) codec encoder & decoder. These are complemented with a full range of other wireless functional blocks and related IP cores for connectivity, channel coding, Digital Front-End (DUC/DDC/DPD/CFR) and security. Visit http://www.xilinx.com/ipcenter/ for more information.

Xilinx WiMAX Web Portal

In addition to silicon and IP, Xilinx has developed a comprehensive online resource to provide WiMAX product designers with a vast array of solutions and information in a single location. The portal provides users with a rich source of information including WiMAX technology tutorials, market overviews, system block diagrams, extensive glossaries and links to third party solutions. Visit www.xilinx.com/wimax for more information.

About Xilinx

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

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* As compared to IP purchased separately (bundle pricing).

CONTACT: Tamara Snowden of Xilinx North America, +1-408-879-6146, or
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Web site: http://www.xilinx.com/