Sun, Xilinx ignite CMT development market

HEIDELBERG, GERMANY: At the International Conference for Field Programmable Logic and Applications, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Xilinx Inc. unveiled a feature-rich, high-performance programmable OpenSPARC evaluation platform.

The platform provides academic researchers and hardware developers with a flexible OpenSPARC-based platform to create, customize and deploy next-generation applications for a broad set of end markets including supercomputers, industrial, scientific and medical (ISM), aerospace & defense, and storage and networking.

"Our collaboration with industry leaders such as Xilinx will continue to drive the momentum and expansion of the UltraSPARC ecosystem," said Mike Knudsen, vice president, business development and marketing for Sun's Microelectronics unit. "The microprocessor industry is steadily shifting towards CMT architectures, and this new OpenSPARC FPGA evaluation platform puts us in a prime position to enable faster time-to-market for our customers."

"The OpenSPARC Evaluation Platform will help microprocessor pedagogy to leap out of the textbook into the students' hands," said James. C. Hoe, associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. "This is a powerful enabling asset in teaching and research, especially at a time when we are striving to understand how to best deploy and leverage parallelism in future microprocessor systems."

Based on the power of an open-sourced 32-thread UltraSPARC T1 processor and combined with the high-performance Xilinx 65nm Virtex-5 FPGA technology, the platform will provide a foundation for innovation across a range of disciplines including; computer architecture, logic design, compiler techniques and parallel programming. Based on its programmable architecture, the platform allows multiple design iterations providing faster time- to-market, greater flexibility and reduced complexity.

"Today's designs demand more processing power, higher reliability, and increased application intelligence," said Ivo Bolsens, chief technology officer for Xilinx. "Combining Sun's multithreading processing technology with our industry-leading silicon and design tools provides a solid platform for academics and developers to build and test novel ideas in hardware and software design."

University donation program proliferates adoption

Sun and Xilinx also announced today the development of a joint University donation program, facilitated through the OpenSPARC University Program, whereby academic professors can apply for grants to help kick-start curricula and university research programs. Applications are specifically encouraged for the development of high-performance, multi-thread and low-power computing applications.

The Sun and Xilinx-based OpenSPARC FPGA development platform is immediately available through Digilent.