SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Xilinx, Inc., (NASDAQ:XLNX) continued to outpace its competition in semiconductor performance and density with today's announcement that it is shipping the world's fastest, highest-density programmable chip available on the market. At eight million gates with clock speeds of over 400 MHz, and I/O speeds of 840 Mb/s, the Virtex-II Platform FPGA XC2V8000 is 73 percent larger than any competitive device available today.Xilinx Virtex-II Platform FPGAs deliver unprecedented logic, memory, and I/O capacity. The XC2V8000 FPGA includes 104,832 logic cells, over 3 megabits of block RAM, 12 Digital Clock Managers (DCMs), 168 18x18 multipliers, and 824 I/O pins, including 412 differential I/O pairs.On-chip memory resources, flexible and fast I/O and high performance logic have become increasingly important as a growing base of today's system designers opt to use FPGAs rather than ASIC devices in their high performance applications. The Virtex-II series FPGAs, with their abundant memory and 400+ MHz clock rates, are proven solutions for handling large data streams in terabit and pedabit routers, network port aggregation, and high-end broadcast equipment video imaging and computer graphics systems.Xilinx credits this breakthrough in Virtex-II performance and densities to a combination of advanced 0.15 CMOS process technology, jointly developed with fab partner UMC, and electronic design automation software tools and methodologies tuned to maximize programmable chip performance."UMC played a fundamental role in helping Xilinx deliver this device into customer hands," said Rich Sevcik, senior vice president and general manager of FPGA products at Xilinx. "Just as importantly, Xilinx and our EDA partners offer system designers a complete tool suite and methodologies that make it possible to fully exploit the device densities and performance of our Virtex-II platform FPGAS." Xilinx Inc. United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC)