Avnet Electronics Marketing Pioneers Xilinx SpeedWay Design Workshops in Asia with Outstanding Results

Avnet Electronics Marketing Pioneers Xilinx SpeedWay Design Workshops in Asia with Outstanding Results

March 12, 2007

Covering 23 Cities in 10 Markets, Overall Attendance Topped
1,200, Beating All Expectations 


    SINGAPORE, March 12 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- Avnet
Electronics Marketing Asia, a leading distributor of
electronic components and a division of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE:
AVT), has concluded a series of pioneering Xilinx SpeedWay
design workshops in Asia Pacific, with remarkable results
and record attendance.  The workshop series, which
comprised more than 80 classes, held in 23 cities in 10
markets, was designed to train engineering professionals
interested in using Xilinx FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate
Arrays), for embedded processing, serial connectivity, and
high performance digital signal processing (DSP). 

    Avnet Electronics Marketing is the only distributor to
run global workshops specifically for Xilinx customers. 
The SpeedWay workshops included half-day and full-day
sessions catering to both entry-level and expert users. 
Conducted by local field application engineers and
specialists from Avnet Electronics Marketing, they offered
in-depth technical training with practical
"how-to" tutorials on the latest Xilinx
technology and provided hands-on experience with the newest
Xilinx tools and development boards.

    "We conducted a pilot programme and received great
feedback so we were confident that the workshop series would
be a success.  The results actually exceeded our own
expectations," said C.C. Lim, vice president of
marketing at Avnet Electronics Marketing Asia.  "We
targeted to attract approximately 800 attendees, but the
level of interest was overwhelmingly high and in the end we
coached well over a thousand engineers, and more than 160
Xilinx Spartan-3E Starter Kits were sold during the
event."

    "The success of the workshops reflects the fact
that we have achieved our commitment to customer's
satisfaction; going forward we will continue to provide
technical support which helps our customers to design with
Xilinx devices throughout the product development life
cycle." Lim added.

    "With the explosive growth in FPGA-based embedded
processing and DSP applications across the region, Avnet's
Speedway workshops are fulfilling the high level of demand
among digital designers to gain practical, hands-on
experience on our industry-leading Virtex-4 and Spartan-3
FPGAs," said Yang-Chiah Yee, Asia Pacific sales vice
president for Xilinx.

    "For example, engineers learned to develop
high-performance, flexible embedded systems using our EDK
embedded processing design software on our FPGA devices
with an embedded PowerPC processor core or our
soft-processor MicroBlaze core.  They were also trained to
implement high-performance DSP solutions for multimedia,
video and imaging applications on our FPGA devices using
our System Generator for DSP development tool," he
said.

    The following boards were used:

    -- Xilinx Video Starter Kit -- Video
    -- Xilinx Spartan-3 PCI Express Starter Kit -- PCI
Express
    -- Xilinx Spartan-3E Starter Kit -- FPGA Design
    -- Avnet Virtex-4 FX12LC -- embedded and networking
    -- Avnet Virtex-4 SX35+ Analog Module -- DSP

    Avnet Electronics Marketing ran its Xilinx SpeedWay
design workshop series in mainland China, Taiwan and Korea.
 The most recent batch focused on DSP, MGT and uCLinux. 
More information about SpeedWay workshops can be found at
http://www.em.avnet.com/xilinxspeedway .

    About Avnet Electronics Marketing
    Avnet Electronics Marketing Asia is part of
Phoenix-based Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), a Fortune 500
company with fiscal 2006 sales exceeding USD$14.25 billion.
 Serving customers in approximately 70 countries, Avnet is
one of the world's largest technology marketing,
distribution and services companies.

    Avnet Electronics Marketing has a significant presence
in Asia-Pacific -- the fastest growing electronics market
in the world.  With its regional headquarters in Singapore,
the company has 38 locations in 10 countries in Asia. It
distributes semiconductors, interconnect, passive and
electromechanical components to serve a wide range of
customers including original equipment manufacturers
(OEMs), electronic manufacturing services (EMS) providers,
and small- to medium-sized businesses, and provides
associated design-chain and supply-chain services.  The
company's web site is located at http://www.em.avnet.com

    Note to editors: this release can also be found on the
EBA Web site at http://www.eba.com.hk .  For enquiries on
releases by email, please call Rosa Lee at (852) 2537 8022
or send a message to [e-mail] .

    The workshops, which were held over a period of six
months, covered the following topics:

    Topic                                            Number
of   Number of
                                                     
classes    attendees
                                                           
      
    Creating a Low-Cost PCI Express Design                6
         80 
    Xilinx DSP Development                               10
        167 
    Xilinx Embedded Software Development                 14
        176 
    Introduction to FPGA Design                          19
        341 
    Xilinx DSP for Video                                  4
         81 
    Embedded Networking with Xilinx FPGAs                 4
         65 
    Xilinx Microblaze Development                        18
        256 
    Xilinx Power PC Development                           2
         30 
    Improving Design Performance                          4
         68 
       Total                                             81
      1,264 


    For further information, please contact:

     Jaime Chan:
     Tel:   [phone]
     Email: [e-mail]

     Brian Paterson (EBA): 
     Tel:   [phone]
     Email: [e-mail]