SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Xilinx, Inc. (Nasdaq: XLNX - News) announced today that it has expanded device support for its free PicoBlaze 8-bit microcontroller reference design to include Virtex-II(TM) Series FPGAs and CoolRunner-II(TM) CPLDs. Now customers can leverage the complete range of programmable products from Xilinx, including the high performance Virtex-II Series to the low cost and low power CoolRunner-II CPLDs. The PicoBlaze reference design is fully customizable and is an ideal solution for quickly building simple, flexible, and extremely cost-effective embedded designs using programmable logic. "PicoBlaze is an ideal solution for optimizing cost-sensitive designs," said Per Holmberg, director of programmable systems marketing at Xilinx. "It's easy to use and very area-efficient which has made it the most popular soft microcontroller in the market. By expanding support to include CoolRunner-II CPLDs and Virtex-II Series FPGAs, our users now have access to microcontroller solutions meeting even lower cost targets and higher performance." All of the PicoBlaze reference designs support 49 different 16- to 18-bit instructions, 8 to 32 general-purpose 8-bit registers, 256 directly and indirectly addressable ports, reset, and a maskable interrupt. Xilinx Inc.