December 15, 2004 -- Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet, Inc., and Xilinx Inc. have announced the immediate availability of the Xilinx FPGA-based PICMG ATCA 3.0 Design Kit. The kit, featuring a development board using a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro device, is the first solution stemming from the joint effort between Avnet and Xilinx to accelerate the adoption of the ATCA PICMG standard for high-speed networking and communication designs.

The programmable PICMG ATCA 3.0 Design Kit contains a complete reference design platform to assist with developing, prototyping and testing high-speed PICMG ATCA-based networking, communications and storage equipment. By way of the ATCA Development Platform Program announced earlier this year, Xilinx has selected Avnet as the exclusive source for these platforms based on its extensive expertise in high-speed systems design. The ATCA Design Kit provides a proven physical layer interface and other capabilities that can help reduce design cycles by as much as several man-years for equipment compatible with this emerging standard.

The PICMG ATCA 3.0 Design Kit can be used as a development platform for PICMG 3.0 full-mesh line cards supporting system configurations of up to 16-cards and port rates to 2.5 Gbps. The kit comes with a development board that uses the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro RocketIO multi-gigabit transceivers (MGT) to connect to the PICMG ATCA full-mesh backplane. The full-mesh card allows application flexibility by reserving an area of the board for a plug-in "personality module" (PM), where users can implement any application-specific line card and easily connect to the full-mesh card through the included headers. The kit uses a standard footprint and ensures interoperability via full compliance with the PICMG 3.0 standard.

Pricing and Availability

The PICMG ATCA 3.0 Design Kit, which includes a development board using a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro 2VP50 or 2VP70 device, example test design, user's guide, schematics, bill of materials and documentation CD-ROM, is readily available. Avnet also offers optional elements such as training and design services support.