VMETRO to deliver board-level solutions based on Xilinx Virtex-5 LXT FPGAs

By Courtney E. Howard

HOUSTON - VMETRO executives have announced plans to augment the company’s VXS, XMC, and PMC board-level product families to include platforms based on the new Virtex-5 LXT FPGA platform from Xilinx Inc. in San Jose, Calif.

VMETRO in Houston is developing boards that take advantage of Virtex-5 LXT FPGAs high-speed serial capabilities for applications such as electro-optics, electronics warfare, signals intelligence, and telecommunications for the defense, aerospace, and high-performance embedded computing applications.

The 65-nanometer Virtex-5 LXT is the first FPGA to deliver a hard-coded PCI Express endpoint and Tri-mode Ethernet media-access controller blocks, Xilinx officials say; moreover, it is the second of four domain-optimized platforms in the Virtex-5 family.

The Virtex-5 LXT platform boasts multichannel serial communications as fast as 3.2 gigabits per second per channel, which lends to increased system flexibility, bandwidth, and scalability.

VMETRO, as a member of the Xilinx early access program, is one of the first technology vendors to reap the low-power serial I/O and built-in PCI Express advantages of Virtex-5 LXT FPGAs in their product lines.

“The addition of low-power, built-in serial communications makes the development of sophisticated solutions easier and more powerful,” says Dave Barker, vice president of business development at VMETRO. VMETRO’s first Virtex-5 LXT-based offering is scheduled to become available in early 2007.