The Hindu Business Line : Xilinx co-designs to focus on aerospace, defence verticals

Hyderabad, Jan. 8 With a thrust on verticals of aerospace and defence, telecom and automotive, fabless semiconductor company Xilinx is poised to offer system software and hardware platform co-designs, according to the Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer, Mr Ivo Bolsens.

Mr Bolsens is actively driving Xilinx hardware and software co-design work that addresses the industry requirement for system-on-chip (SoC) solutions on the field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) which make designs cheaper and faster as opposed to application specific integrated chips (ASICs).

Speaking to newspersons here at the International VLSI Conference today, Mr Bolsens said that typically there is time lag between one family of processors designed on 65 nanometer and 45 nanometer to actually be in the market place.

While a lot of design work is currently being handled on the 45 nanometer chips, chips on them would go mainstream by 2009. Significantly, they require software that complements and Xilinx is focusing attention on this area.

Chip designs

Mr Bolsens mentioned how programmable solutions bring about design flexibility for designers in the areas of applications in defence and aerospace and automotives. Based on the design capability for digital signal processing solutions, Xilinx is developing software and also helping with design tools that complement these chips.

To support chip designs, Mr Bolsens said in the telecom sector, the designers are working on packet radio switching solutions which would have wider ramifications in the rapidly evolving mobile handset industry.

Asked about the Xilinx design focus on aerospace and defence sectors, he said that the effort is to help both civil and defence applications to use radio waves for some common business utilities.