The TMR Tool, combined with Xilinx's QPRO Virtex-II radiation-tolerant platform FPGAs, mitigates the effects of single event upsets in harsh radiation environments enabling the benefits of reconfigurable technologies to be employed in very high reliability applications including deep space, avionics, satellite and communications.

With the new tool, Xilinx firmly establishes its leadership position in enabling multi-million gate reconfigurable technologies as the solution of choice for high-reliability aerospace and defense applications.

"Recent space programs such as the Mars Rover, have heightened both the public and the space communities awareness of the extreme benefits of being able to reconfigure a system after it has been deployed," said Mustafa Veziroglu, general manager of the Market-Specific Product Division at Xilinx.

"With the TMR Tool, Xilinx enables designers to realize the significant advantage of reconfigurable logic in a harsh environment by combining the benefits of reprogrammability, high density and high reliability into a single solution."

"As the leading FPGA supplier to the Aerospace and Defense markets, we expect the adoption of Xilinx solutions to continue as designers rapidly realize the benefits of deploying reconfigurable technology over fixed logic technology for harsh radiation environments."

"Sandia National Laboratories has utilized the Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA series to achieve new levels of performance in the complex high data rate on-board data processing systems for a new advanced technology satellite payload," said Kurt Lanes, senior engineer for the Monitoring Systems and Technology Center at Sandia National Laboratories.

"This system demands the highest level of reliability, availability, processing performance and throughput. The cooperation between Sandia and Xilinx in developing the TMR Tool has yielded excellent results."

"It has provided significant productivity enhancements and implements effective SEU immunity for space radiation environments. We envision using Xilinx FPGAs and the TMR Tool for Sandia's future space programs."

"Today's announcement shatters the myth perpetuated by fixed-logic suppliers that SEU immune designs cannot be implemented with reprogrammable FPGAs. Fixed-logic suppliers are driven to perpetuate this myth given their inability to deliver the multi-million gate densities, performance and flexibility achieved with Xilinx FPGAs," said Rick Padovani, general manager of the Aerospace and Defense Division at Xilinx.

"With efficient design tools to implement triple module redundancy, designers of space-based systems can take full advantage of Xilinx technology and reliability."

The XTMR tool dramatically improves productivity by automatically generating redundant and associated voting circuitry. Designers now only need to generate a design once while the parametrically selectable software tool replicates the design twice.

Because this task was previous done manually, the time it takes for this task is greatly reduced and the potential for error eliminated.

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