Today's news underscores the company's commitment to provide customers with the ultimate connectivity platform and a wide-range of leading parallel and serial connectivity solutions for tomorrow's networking and communication designs. Xilinx, along with other industry leaders, is actively participating as a key developer in the PCI Express Advanced Switching working group to develop the communications extension for PCI Express. Xilinx also plans to incorporate PCI Express with advanced switching into its Virtex-II series FPGAs.

"Xilinx has shown increasing involvement in defining and proving its state-of-the-art I/O technology through its delivery of emerging I/O standards. The release and shipment of this new core at the same time a final specification is released will allow designers to begin prototyping PCI Express solutions immediately, well ahead of any ASIC-based implementations, thereby building significant industry momentum around the newest PCI specification," said Cary Snyder, noted industry expert and analyst. "By using the programmability and serial transceiver capability of the Virtex-II Pro's device, Xilinx was able to develop its core in parallel with its participation in the definition of the specification - a true testament to the capability and benefits of programmable systems."

The PCI Express CoreThe Xilinx PCI Express core is protocol and electrically compatible to the v1.0 base PCI Express specification. Designers can utilize the interface to maximize performance and feature quality for high-performance workstations and consumer gaming devices. The core reaches a 2.5 Gbps line speed utilizing the features of the Rocket I/O multi-gigabit transceivers such as clock data recovery, 8B/10B encoding, 3.125 Gbps SerDes, transmit/receive FIFOs, and CRC. Customers can use the core to design high performance PCI Express systems using Xilinx Smart-IP technology to meet critical 2.5 GHz timing requirements.

"During the past decade, the PCI local bus has been a hugely successful interconnect standard. PCI Express takes PCI to another level, with a high-speed, scalable serial architecture that provides exciting new I/O options for system partitioning designs and form factors," said Tony Pierce, PCI-SIG chairman. "The Virtex-II Pro FPGA and PCI Express core are powerful building blocks in helping the industry-wide transition from PCI to PCI Express."

"As the leader in high-speed interface test and measurement instruments and solutions, Agilent is pleased to be collaborating with Xilinx, the leader in platform and system connectivity solutions, to accelerate the industry-wide adoption of the PCI Express specification," said Byron Anderson, senior vice president and general manager of the Electronic Products and Solutions Group at Agilent Technologies.

PCI Express, like the original PCI standard, is initially oriented toward PC applications. However, it is certain that PCI Express, like PCI, will become the dominant high-speed chip-to-chip and board-to board interconnect technique in embedded systems as well. A wide variety of ASSP chips were developed to support the different PCI versions for PC applications. These same chips were extensively used in embedded systems. FPGAs with PCI cores were available to be used by those that had special system requirements.

The reasons for migrating the PCI shared-bus approach to the high-speed serial PCI Express are the same as those behind the general move to serial interconnects. These have more throughput and fewer pins and circuit board traces.

One major advantage that PCI Express will have over other high-speed serial interconnect schemes is that the higher layers are the same as PCI. Only the PHY and MAC layers are different. The same software and operating systems can therefore be used for both PCI and PCI Express systems.

The just-released version of PCI Express does not contain specifications for the switching fabric. It is expected that switching capability will be released in September of this year. Until that time, PCI Express systems will have to be based on direct connections.