Xilinx Enables Gibson Guitar's Best of Show Award at Annual Consumer Electronics Show

Low Cost Programmable Chips Enable Industry's First Electric Guitar to Deliver True Digital Sound

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 9 -- At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) today, Gibson Guitar and Xilinx, Inc., announced a collaboration that resulted in the prestigious CES Best of Show Award for the Gibson MaGIC true-digital guitar. The internally derived MaGIC digital transfer protocol converts traditional analog output from the guitar into a digital signal, providing real time high-fidelity digital audio to benefit both production and live performances. Gibson credits Xilinx's reprogrammable Spartan-IIE FPGAs as an enabling critical component in its groundbreaking guitar. Gibson is among a growing number of consumer product manufacturers to realize the competitive advantage afforded by Xilinx's low-cost programmable chips, versus traditional ASIC technology.

Gibson will offer MaGIC, an acronym for Media-accelerated Global Information Carrier, in every Gibson guitar within the next 12-18 months. MaGIC applies the digital technology invented for computer network products and adapts them to the audio network. This requires adaptability of the MaGIC standard, made possible by using a programmable versus fixed logic solution.

"Multiple uses of MaGIC would not have been financially or technically possible using traditional ASIC fixed logic. An ASIC platform would have required the design to be re-spun each time a change was made," said Gibson Chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, who spearheaded MaGIC development. "The programmable nature of Xilinx FPGAs not only provided a flexible high-performance design platform for Gibson, it also provided the low cost silicon solution we needed to make it happen."

"Xilinx FPGA technology is helping to shape the future of the digital age by harnessing the flexibility of a programmable device at cost points ideal for consumer products," said Clay Johnson, vice president and general manager of the General Products division at Xilinx. "Gibson's MaGIC technology is a perfect example of our desire to bring the digital age to the consumer market."

The programmability of Xilinx FPGAs also provides Gibson with the ability to achieve its vision of licensing its technology to other music and consumer product manufacturers for future product development. Gibson hopes to achieve this vision by licensing MaGIC free of charge so that it will be embraced as the standard not just in the music industry, but in home networking, home automation, and medical imaging markets as well.

About Xilinx Low Cost FPGAs
Xilinx's Spartan-IIE FPGA is the lowest cost programmable device available in the world today. Since introducing Spartan more than four years ago, Xilinx has delivered four generations of devices, offering customers a low cost, programmable alternative to ASICs without NRE costs. In 2003, the company is on track to deliver a fifth generation of the Spartan Series, reaching even higher densities at significantly lower price points.

Xilinx has been pursuing the low cost end of the PLD market with its Spartan PGAs and CPLDs for some time. This approach has become more feasible and more necessary with the passage of time. For one, the consumer electronics market has fragmented into many sub-markets with the same time-to-market requirements that were once prevalent in the telecommunications segment. The fragmentation and short lifetime of the products has resulted in more modest production requirements - a plus for the PLD approach.

Another factor aiding the allure of PLDs in low-cost applications is the skyrocketing cost of cell-based ASICs. State-of-the-art cell-based ASICs can now only be justified for very high-volume applications such as cell phones or set top boxes. The importance of these low-cost markets has increased recently with the stagnation of growth in the telecom related market.

Xilinx has issued a number of releases related to the use of its devices in equipment exhibited at the Consumer Electronics Show, recently held in Las Vegas. In addition to the use of its Spartan FPGAs in Gibson's MaGIC digital transfer protocol, Xilinx also announced the use of its CoolRunner CPLDs in Amphony's latest 2.4-GHz Model wireless headphones and in Digital Innovations' Neuros MP3 Digital Audio Computer.

Amphony's line of digital wireless headphones and digital wireless audio transmitter products brings freedom of wireless operation to home audio entertainment. Data rates of over 3 Mbps allow the transmission of true CD-quality audio without any audio compression and the inherent audio degradation and latency. The Model 2000 digital wireless headphones from Amphony offer an extended frequency response over the Model 1000 and, according to the company, achieve unprecedented signal-to-noise ratios by employing a noise-shaping filter at the headphones to remove any quantization noise from the audible frequency band.

Digital Innovations' Neuros has several unique features including MyFi, a digital tuning technology enabling wireless high fidelity playback through any FM radio; HiSi, an automatic song identification system that records an audio sample from music heard on the radio or at a live event and converts it to a digital fingerprint for identification and access on the Internet; and NeuroSync, an advanced open synchronization system that automates the transfer of music files to and from the Neuros device independent of a PC.

Another interesting consumer-related application for Xilinx PLDs is the company's work with Alcohol Countermeasure System (ACS) on alcohol sensing and breath test instruments. One result of the design collaboration was the ELAN, a personal microcomputer controlled Alcohol Breath Tester designed to measure an individual's blood alcohol concentration. Not much bigger than a cigarette lighter, the ELAN displays %BAC test results on a 3-digit LCD display within 10 seconds of providing a breath sample. The analyzer sells for $49.