Xilinx has introduced its Virtex-5 FXT FPGA platform which is fully compliant with version 2.0 of the PCI Express standard. It is said to be the first FPGA to support the 5-Gb/s version of the widely adopted serial interconnect standard. Having passed the last round of specification testing at the PCI-SIG's Compliance Workshop #62, the Virtex-5 FXT FPGA platform has been added to the PCI-SIG Integrator's List as the centerpiece of a broad range of design resources from Xilinx and its alliance members that support PCIe 2.0 applications.

With built-in 6.5G-b/s Rocket IO GTX transceiver technology, Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs are well suited to support the PCIe 2.0 specification, which doubles the interconnect bit rate over the previous version from 2.5 Gb/s to 5 Gb/s to support leading-edge high-bandwidth applications. The recently announced Virtex-5 TXT FPGA platform, which has up to 48 RocketIO GTX transceivers, also supports the PCIe 2.0 standard. Drawing less than 150 mW per transceiver at 5 Gb/s, the RocketIO GTX transceivers enable designers to realize high-speed PCIe 2.0 performance on an FPGA with minimal power consumption.

Xilinx teamed up with key alliance members to provide a comprehensive suite of design resources, including IP cores, for PCIe 2.0 multilane (x1, x2, x4, x8) support, hardware development platforms, and reference designs. These complementary offerings provide a complete, scalable and flexible solution to quickly develop systems with higher performing interconnect at lower cost to deliver first-time design success.

Xilinx Alliance Program members GDA, Northwest Logic and PLDA provide IP cores to enable PCI Express solutions on Xilinx Virtex-5 FXT FPGA devices. The Xilinx Virtex-5 FXT is the first FPGA platform to provide PCIe 2.0 x8 support. IP Cores from all three of these alliance members have passed the PCI Express version 2.0 compliance testing. In addition, Northwest Logic provides DMA back-end core, combining with their x8 PCIe 2.0 core to support high-performance, on-demand, multi-DMA engine operation with 3000-MB/s card-to-system and 2600-MB/s system-to-card throughput on an Intel DX58SO platform.

The Virtex-5 FXT and the newly introduced TXT silicon platforms contain the same high-performance GTX transceivers; in addition, all IP and reference designs for PCIe 2.0 available for the Virtex-5 FXT platform can be easily ported to the Virtex-5 TXT platform.