Philips, Xilinx team up in low cost PCI Express solutions

Royal Philips Electronics and Xilinx Inc. will cooperate in the design of semiconductor hardware and IP related to the PCI Express interface. The collaboration is expected to result in a PCI Express solution that will help current and prospective customers to migrate from legacy PC bus architectures to the new, simplified PCI Express high-speed interface architecture.

Based on Xilinx 90nm Spartan-3 FPGAs and Philips PCI Express PHY devices, the solution is expected to provide maximum flexibility benefits addressing a wide variety of applications across many volume ranges. PCI Express is the successor to Intel's PCI and PCI-X architectures used in PCs throughout the world, offering scalable bandwidth from 2.5 to 80Gbps and advanced features to meet the input/output needs of next generation systems. Its layered architecture allows future add-ons for connections to copper, optical and other emerging physical signaling media. The solution supports eXPIPE interfaces between the physical and logical layers.

"Our customers are looking for an easy migration path from current bus architectures to the high-speed capabilities of PCI Express," said Mark Aaldering, VP of IP solutions and the embedded processing division at Xilinx. "By working closely with Philips, we hope to bring the benefits of programmability and PCI Express to an even broader audience — to run premium movies and sound on PCs and other emerging consumer electronics systems and products," Aaldering added.