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Micron at the 2019 Xilinx Developer Forum

Donato Bianco, Jay Walstrum, Redge Villanueva | February 2020

Last quarter, Micron’s Embedded Business Unit was a Bronze Sponsor at the 2019 Xilinx Developer Forum (XDF) Europe in Den Haag, The Netherlands, and attended 2019 XDF US in San Jose, California. XDF is one of the key technology events where Xilinx and its ecosystem partners gather to share their latest technology innovations. With more than 800 and 1,300 participants attending in Europe and the U.S. respectively, the atmosphere of these events was hectic! Developers, media and Xilinx employees were steeped in deep-dive technical sessions, hands-on labs, seminars, numerous presenters and partner booths.

Demo Zone at the 2019 XDF in Den Haag
Donato Bianco at the Micron booth during the 2019 XDF in Den Haag

Micron had a booth at XDF Europe featuring a live demo of Micron DDR4 and LPDDR4x devices on Xilinx Versal VCK190 evaluation board with the latest Vivado 2019.2 software. It demonstrated successful DDR4-3200 and LPDDR4x-4266 memory calibration tests and data eye scans, which can be beneficial for customer debugging activities.

Calibration and data eye scan live demonstration of Versal ACAP development board with Micron DDR4 and LPDDR4x memory at the 2019 XDF in Den Haag

We also displayed various Xilinx development boards populated with Micron LPDDR4x, DDR4, e.MMC and SPI NOR flash memories. Below is a picture of the Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC ZCU102 board as an example. A TV monitor in the booth displayed a slideshow of Xilinx boards with Micron DRAM and flash memories.

ZCU102 board with Micron memories

The Micron Xccela™ Flash development kit was also displayed at the booth. This is a daughter card with Micron Xccela Flash for use on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 Zedboard™. Customers can test the performance of Micron Xccela Flash using this daughter card connected to the Zedboard.

Zedboard with Micron DDR3L memory and Xccela flash daughter card.

At the 2019 XDF show in San Jose, Tom Eby, senior vice president and general manager of Micron’s Compute & Networking Business Unit, was the guest speaker during one of the Xilinx keynote presentations, talking about how Micron memories and Xilinx solutions work together in the data center and machine-learning applications.

Tom Eby at the 2019 XDF in San Jose, California

Eby outlined how Micron sees information as today’s most critical resource – it is not a challenge to be tamed but an opportunity to be unlocked. A raw material that, with the appropriate vision, tools and skills, can be transformed to accelerate intelligence, inspiring the world to learn, communicate and advance faster than ever.

Addressing AI applications as a dynamic activity, the Versal ACAP platform provides high performance and flexible solutions to the data center architecture. Versal’s memory support for DDR4, and soon for future high-performance memory, provides optimal efficiency with the adaptability required for this ever-changing market space. The flexibility enabled by Xilinx’s solutions makes them a great partner to rapidly bring customized memory solutions to market, particularly for hyperscale customers.

The 2019 XDF events in Europe and the U.S. gave Micron the opportunity not only to demonstrate the teamwork that transpired between the Micron U.S. and Europe teams during the event preparations, but most especially to showcase our long-standing and invaluable relationship with Xilinx.

Sr. Ecosystem Enablement Manager

Donato Bianco

Attracted to technology since the era of 300 baud modems, Donato Bianco works to drive and develop business with ecosystem partners in EMEA. He endeavors to positively influence the conditions of our communities and the environment in both his personal and professional life. Donato holds a master’s degree in electronics.

Sr. Manager, Enterprise Business Development

Jay Walstrum

Jay Walstrum is a Senior System Architect for Micron’s Compute and Networking Business Unit, where he is focusing on new opportunities in the three to five-plus year timeframe. In his role, he also applies innovative technologies and memory architectures to solve customer system-level challenges.

Jay’s responsibilities include working closely with a market-strategy team to identify new technology, applications, product/architecture specifications, customers, and markets for new product concepts. He also actively works with customer system architects, technologists, third-party developers, and Micron’s Research and Development team to identify, define, and architect innovative memory solutions.

Before beginning with Micron in January 2013, Jay spent 22 years at Xilinx Corp, where he held various positions ranging from the Director of Quality, to the Senior Product Planning Manager, to the Strategic and Technical Marketing Leader.

Jay holds a BSEE from University of Southern California. He holds 11 patents in the areas of FPGA system Solutions and memory interface architecture.

Sr. Ecosystem Enablement Manager

Redge Villanueva

Redge Villanueva is a Senior Ecosystem Manager at Micron, enabling Micron memories on SoC platforms for automotive and embedded applications. She has held engineering and marketing roles at Intel and Micron for 25 years. Redge holds a BSECE from University of Santo Tomas and an MBA from Sacramento State University.