Xilinx announced that its Spartan-6 FPGA family is compliant with the PCI Express 1.1 specification, enabling implementation of serial connectivity solutions for consumer, automotive, wireless, and other price-sensitive or high volume markets. Spartan-6 FPGAs satisfy the cost, ease-of-use, and low power requirements of developing systems compliant with PCIe for applications such as in-vehicle infotainment, flat-panel displays, and video surveillance.

The integrated Endpoint block for PCI Express in Spartan-6 LXT FPGAs has passed PCI-SIG compliance and interoperability testing for PCIe 1.1 single-lane configurations. PCIe 1.1 is implemented in Spartan-6 LXT devices with Xilinx GTP serial transceivers capable of up to 3.125Gbps and the LogiCORE solution using the integrated Endpoint block for PCI Express. The GTP serial transceivers are fully characterized across process, voltage, and temperature (PVT). The complete PCI-SIG compliance report is available for download. Designers can begin the evaluation and design of PCI Express 1.1 compliant systems with the Spartan-6 FPGA SP605 Evaluation Kit.

The Xilinx CORE Generator system in the ISE Design Suite 11 delivered with the kit enables designers to configure the PCIe Endpoint block for their applications. It comes complete with reference design and all the scripts, basic testbench, and simulation models needed to streamline verification with customer designs. Designers can download at no charge the ISE WebPACK software or trial version of the full featured ISE Design Suite from the Xilinx web site.