SAN JOSE, Calif. — Xilinx Inc. has stopped development work on its XC6200 line of partially reconfigurable field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and the founders of the the company's reconfigurable R&D group in Edinburgh, Scotland, John Gray and Tom Kean, have both left the company. The remaining engineering staff at Edinburgh has been reassigned to develop IP cores for use by Xilinx's customers within the company's FPGAs.

However, Xilinx says it remains committed to the partial reconfigurability offered by the XC6200 devices and will offer many of the features of the XC6200 in its next-generation FPGA family, known as Virtex.

"John Gray is still working for Xilinx as a consultant," said Roland Triffaux, manager of Xilinx Europe. "Tom Kean and another two engineers have left to start a company in California."

That spin-off company, called Quicksilver, is believed to have some backing from Xilinx. Quicksilver is looking to apply reconfigurable logic to multiprotocol handsets for mobile communications, sources said. It is also believed to be working with systems companies on the application of reconfigurable logic.

Gray said his departure from the company was amicable. "I am just looking to do something that's more fun again," he said. "It's time to kick back a bit."

Meanwhile, Kean is reacquiring the name Algotronix from Xilinx. Kean and Gray led Algotronix Ltd. in the early 1990s before it was acquired by Xilinx in 1993, when it became the basis of the reconfigurable R&D group, and was named Xilinx Development Corp.

Algotronix developed a reconfigurable FPGA architecture known as CAL (configurable array logic), which eventually became the XC6200. Kean said the new Algotronix would act as a consultancy and would advise users on the application of reconfigurable logic.

Xilinx said the work of the R&D group was largely completed. "The goal of the reconfigurable group in Edinburgh has been achieved," Triffaux said. XC6200 devices would continue to be available for academic and commercial research groups, as they have been in the past. "We never really sold it," Triffaux said.

Peter Cheung, a researcher in the department of electrical and electronic engineering at Imperial College of Science and Technology (London), has used XC6200 devices for reconfigurable hardware platforms. "We've heard they are not developing the XC6200," Cheung said. "Unless there is a real commitment to it we may have to look at other things. The tools for 6200 are primitive and not well done.

"In many ways it [the XC6200] was a product ahead of its time," he said. "It was a beautifully conceived device but not sufficiently well supported."

Triffaux said the change is a transition. "The research has moved from architecture to software," he said. "Virtex is coming up nicely. Silicon is due in September or October and revision 1.5 of Xilinx software will support Virtex. That will be the first time we will have software before hardware."