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The flat-panel display market is one of the fastest growing segments in the electronics industry, thanks to declining prices and government mandates promoting digital programming. Panel makers are expanding their production capacities to meet demands and encourage greater adoption. According to iSuppli, worldwide shipments of LCD and PDP TVs are expected to increase from 20 million units in 2004 to nearly 80 million units in 2009. To address the increasing consumer demand for flat-panel displays, low-cost and flexible development approaches such as the Spartan-3E Displays Solutions board are required to reduce development time and enable designers to incorporate the latest feature sets to hit fast-moving market windows.

"Cost and time are the two critical factors in this market and a Spartan- enabled development solution that gives designers access to all the required functionality for a wide range of display products will provide significant benefits in both areas. By combining the application expertise of our partner Tokyo Electron Device with the programmability and capabilities of our Spartan-3E family, developers can keep pace with the dynamic requirements of the display market," said Clay Johnson, vice president and general manager of the General Products Division at Xilinx.

The Spartan-3E family of devices offers the lowest-cost FPGA solution for a wide range of applications, offering more logic functionality and performance features than any other FPGA in its class. Efficiently utilizing advanced 90-nanometer (nm) semiconductor technology, Spartan-3E devices provide the platform with aggressive pricing, density and feature-rich programmable platforms for testing and prototyping display systems. The platform benefits from the highly-integrated nature of the Spartan-3E architecture, which allows a variety of critical features for displays, such as RSDS interfacing, parallel digital signal processing, on-chip memory and high-speed external memory access, to be included on a single Spartan device. Specifically, the development platform utilizes the Spartan-3E XC3S1600E device, which delivers needed capacity to integrate key components such as integrated microcontrollers and embedded MicroBlaze(TM) 32-bit processors.

"Tokyo Electron Device is pleased to have collaborated with Xilinx in developing the groundbreaking Spartan-3E Display Solutions Board," said Toshiaki Sunagawa, TED president. "This advanced development platform represents a cornerstone of our Inrevium offerings of development boards and intellectual property offerings, and we chose to use Spartan-3E devices or this based on their leading edge capabilities and extremely low cost."

Display Panel and Video Board Connections

The Spartan-3E Display Solutions Board offers standard connections to display panels and video/tuner boards to verify connectivity solutions and image enhancement algorithms. For display board connectivity, it provides 7:1 LVDS Rx, TCON (timing controller), and a host of supported IO standards, including LVDS, RSDS, and mini-LVDS. Display image-enhancement algorithm IP that implements precise gamma correction, image dithering, color temperature adjustment, and dynamic false contour reduction is also available to support accelerated development efforts. For the video/tuner boards, image-enhancement algorithm IP such as dynamic gamma correction, motion artifact estimation and compensation, favorite color transform (FCT), brightness and contrast adjustment, hue and saturation adjustment, sharpness enhancement, and noise reduction is also available.

Pricing and Availability

The Spartan-3E Displays Solutions Board is priced at $1200 with availability beginning Q1 2006. This package includes the solutions board, a DVI interface board and a DDR reference design along with associated documentation. For more information on the Spartan-3E Displays Solutions Board, visit www.xilinx.com/displays.

About Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGAs

Based on its industry leading performance and low price points, the Spartan Series has been broadly adopted in high-volume, consumer applications such as DVD players, plasma displays and HDTV -- resulting in an estimated 70% percent lead over the company's nearest competitor. With the recent introduction of its Spartan-3E family, Xilinx continues to add new market- specific features to its low cost Spartan Series while reducing the cost by 30X since its introduction, offering devices priced under $2*. All five Spartan-3E device members are currently in production. For more information on the Spartan-3 and Spartan-3E FPGA families, please visit www.xilinx.com/esp/S3.htm. For pricing and availability information, please contact a Xilinx sales representative or distributor.

About Tokyo Electron Device

Tokyo Electron Device Limited (TED) is a trading company that specializes in electronics components and products. TED provides semiconductors, boards, software and other electronic components on the strength of their worldwide marketing power. As for Xilinx products, TED boasts the top sales as one of Xilinx's distributors in Japan. TED provides high-value added "inrevium design service," thus attaining numerous achievements in a wide range of fields. Additionally, TED delivers in an international marketplace "inrevium products" such as evaluation boards and companion chips using Xilinx devices. Visit www.teldevice.co.jp/eng 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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*Based on 500K unit volume, second half 2006, -4 speed grade, commercial temperature, lowest cost package option

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