SAN JOSE, Oct. 25, 2004 - Xilinx Inc. and Ansoft Corp. announced a new Gigabit Interconnect Design Kit that allows customers to perform extremely accurate "what if" analyses on high-speed PCB and backplane designs.

Powered with Virtex-II Pro X series FPGAs from Xilinx, the kit enables engineers to anticipate problems early in the design phase and predict the quality of a signal, thereby significantly minimizing lab debug times and costly board respins.

Xilinx teamed with Ansoft to provide methods and guidelines for modeling high-speed interconnects. Accurate electrical models that account for the physical effects have been created for the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro X IC package, microstrip and stripline transmission lines, connectors and circuit board via using electromagnetic-field simulation.

The full channel response - from the integrated circuit through the package, onto the board and out the connector - was computed using Ansoft's Nexxim, DesignerSI and HFSS for circuit, system and electromagnetic simulation.