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Avnet and Xilinx end 90-city global technical seminars. EMEA activities run by Silica, exceed expectations.

Phoenix/US and Poing/D – August 17, 2007 – Avnet Electronics Marketing (NYSE: AVT) and Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) have concluded their 90-city global X-Fest technical seminars. More than 7,000 attended the technical sessions held across the globe. Attendance exceeded expectations in all regions. In Europe, Avnet Electronics Marketing’s business unit SILICA hosted the entire X-Fest series in 25 locations with more than 2,000 attending customers.

Working with key technology suppliers such as Xilinx, Texas Instruments, and Analog Devices, X-Fest seminars offered design engineers practical, how-to training around system-level design for FPGA, DSP and embedded systems designers and ran worldwide in locations throughout Europe, Asia, Japan and North America. The global tour began in April and ended last month.

Attendees said the solutions approach was the biggest draw of the event, praising the quality of the technical content of the workshops.

“I liked the fact that the X-Fest seminars showed the actual capabilities of the products, which is what I came to see,” said Rolf Thompson, a U.S.-based design engineer for L-3 Communications. “I was also impressed to see such a large cross-section of the supplier community involved in the event – having all the suppliers that support the Xilinx chips in one place was really helpful. X-Fest was a great opportunity to talk with other engineers and learn from their experiences with these technologies.”

“X-Fest is a well organized event, which has offered a series of practical training programs, especially in the domain of Embedded Systems and Digital Signal Processing. Through the one-day program, the multiple learning tracks have provided the delegates with a diverse selection of the topics to attend,” said Chen Xiaofan, Senior HW/FW Engineer, Engineering Distributed I/O, Rockwell Automation Asia Pacific Business Center Pte Ltd.

Strong attendance numbers and overwhelmingly positive post-conference comments indicate the need for this type of collaborative effort to support the needs of the market.  Tim Barber, vice president of global Xilinx marketing for Avnet Electronics Marketing said, “Our vision for X-Fest was to deliver detailed, real-world system design concepts that would apply directly to the challenges and experiences of working engineers.

The positive feedback we have received from customers around the globe confirms that they derive huge value from the very unique multi-vendor, technical format that X-Fest delivered.”

“X-Fest truly set a precedent in our industry,” said Chris Henry, vice president of channel sales at Xilinx. “It was an ideal platform to expose designers to a broad range of real-world topics wired specifically to help them advance their Xilinx design efforts. Never before have so many FPGA-centric solution providers come together on a worldwide scale to help customers experience first-hand how Xilinx FPGAs can be at the heart of successful end products.”

Plans are already underway for the next X-Fest technical seminar series, which is tentatively scheduled to begin in the fall of 2008.

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About Avnet Electronics Marketing

Avnet Electronics Marketing is an operating group of Phoenix-based Avnet, Inc. (NYSE:AVT), a Fortune 500 company. Avnet Electronics Marketing serves electronic original equipment manufacturers (EOEMs) and electronic manufacturing services (EMS) providers in 70 countries, distributing electronic components from leading manufacturers and providing associated design-chain and supply-chain services. The group's Web site is located at http://www.em.avnet.com.


About SILICA

SILICA, a division of Avnet Electronics Marketing EMEA (Europe, Middle-East, Africa), is a highly specialised semiconductor distributor. SILICA operates 37 branch offices throughout Europe and provides customers with a broad portfolio of semiconductor products from 23 leading vendors along with in-depth technical support and the full set of logistics and value added services. The company's Web site is located at http://www.silica.com.

About Xilinx

Xilinx, Inc. is the worldwide leader of programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit http://www.xilinx.com.