16 January 2003 -- Marconi has chosen the Virtex-II Platform field-programmable gate array ICs (FPGAs) of Xilinx Inc - which claims to be the worldwide leader of programmable logic and programmable system solutions - for Gigabit Ethernet traffic over its SONET and SDH products for optical network applications.
The new generation of products offers service providers improvements in core and metropolitan networks, as well as a flexible evolution path towards integrated optical networking. Xilinx says that time-to-market and flexibility were key factors in Marconi's choice of the Virtex-II family over a typical application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) solution.
Marconi's Data Interface product director Alberto Mari said: "By using a reconfigurable solution in our next-generation products, we were able to speed up the development cycle and upgrade the functionality of the chip, which gave us a significant time-to-market and flexibility advantage."
"Virtex-II Platform FPGAs have the right combination of feature set and powerful development software that Marconi needed for their SDH technology," said Roberto Rosaia, Xilinx's area sales director for Southern Europe. "We will continue to provide them with design flexibility benefits that will allow them to evolve SDH into the future."
Xilinx claims that the Virtex-II Platform FPGA family delivers the highest performance and highest density of any programmable logic solution available. The Virtex-II IP-Immersion architecture enables integration of both hard and soft intellectual property (IP), enhanced system memory, and DSP functionality, providing a platform for advanced digital design. With densities ranging from 40,000 to 8 million system gates, Virtex-II solutions are empowered by design tools that reduce development time through fast design, powerful synthesis, smart implementation algorithms and efficient verification capabilities.