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Avnet Earns Three Spots in EDN Hot 100 Products of 2015

AVT | January 6, 2016

Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), a leading global technology distributor, today announced that three Avnet-designed solutions were recently chosen among the top 100 Hot Products of 2015 by EDN magazine. Selected by EDN readers and editors for their innovation, usefulness and popularity were: Avnet’s PicoZed™ SDR Z7035/AD9361 SOM, the “ARTY” Artix^®-7 35T FPGA Evaluation Kit and the SmartFusion2 KickStart Development Kit.

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Avnet-Designed Boards on the EDN Hot 100 Products for 2015: (left to right) SmartFusion2 KickStart Development Kit, PicoZed SDR SOM, ARTY Artix-7 35T Evaluation Kit (Photo: Business Wire)

“Of the many thousands of products announced during the past year, the EDN Hot 100 are the products that especially caught the attention of our editors and readers. We are pleased to share this annual tradition of showcasing these standout technologies as we celebrate another stellar year of electronics innovation,” said Suzanne Deffree, executive editor, EDN.

Each year, Avnet releases about a dozen new development boards and kits created to help simplify the new product design process and reduce time to market for customers, while boosting market penetration for the supplier technologies represented on the boards. Development kits include the tools and support needed to bring products from prototype to production, including software, reference designs, cables and programming hardware.

“Avnet has a long history of working with our suppliers to create development kits and reference designs that enable Avnet’s broad base of design customers to quickly learn and adopt the newest technologies,” said Jim Beneke, vice president, global technical marketing at Avnet. “Receiving this recognition from EDN is yet another confirmation of the success we have realized with this program.”

Avnet’s PicoZed SDR system-on-module was one of 12 products recognized by EDN in the Development Kit category. The PicoZed SDR SOM combines Analog Devices' AD9361 RF agile transceiver with a Xilinx Zynq-7035 all-programmable SoC. A differentiating feature of this low-power, small-footprint SOM is that it enables engineers to start application-level development immediately with the same system-on-module that will be used in production SDR equipment.

Avnet also had two of the five products highlighted by EDN in the Programmable Logic category. Avnet’s “ARTY” Artix^®-7 35T FPGA Evaluation Kit is designed around the industry’s best low-end performance per-watt Artix®-7 35T FPGA from Xilinx. This low-cost kit helps designers jump start embedded applications from lightweight microcontroller applications to compute-intensive Linux-based systems.

“It is gratifying to see the industry recognize the value of the ARTY Evaluation Kit, which is a capable embedded platform providing tremendous ease-of-use for designers new to FPGAs,” said Evan Leal, product marketing director, boards and kits, Xilinx. “At the low price of $99, ARTY provides designers affordable access to the industry’s best performance per-watt Artix®-7 35T FPGA, allowing them to prototype for a remarkable range of applications.”

The SmartFusion2 KickStart Development Kit from Avnet features the Microsemi M2S010S SmartFusion2, an SEU-immune SoC FPGA that integrates 10,000 logic elements and a 166-MHz ARM Cortex-M3 processor. The unique design of the SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA, mixing a hardened MCU block and FPGA on a single die, enables designers to maximize the functional resources common to many systems in minimal silicon space – a significant advantage in today’s small form-factor mobile devices.

“We at Microsemi were thrilled to collaborate with Avnet on the SmartFusion2 KickStart kit,” said Ted Marena, director of FPGA marketing at Microsemi. “The designation from EDN only further validates this compelling development system. With this kit and the included HDL and C code software, customers experience the fullest-featured low density FPGAs. In addition, SmartFusion2’s proven security features can be demonstrated at a price that meets their design budget.”

Avnet is providing customer hands-on training with these products through a series of SpeedWay Design Workshops. The Software-Defined Radio with PicoZed™ SDR SpeedWay will run in the Americas through early February 2016 and in Asia through March 2016. The Introduction to Vivado SpeedWay Design Workshops, featuring the Artix^®-7 35T FPGA Evaluation Kit, will run in various locations throughout the Americas, EMEA and Asia, through late April 2016. For more information on these training events, visit www.em.avnet.com/training.

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About Avnet, Inc.

From components to cloud and design to disposal, Avnet, Inc. (NYSE:AVT) accelerates the success of customers who build, sell and use technology globally by providing them with a comprehensive portfolio of innovative products, services and solutions. Avnet is a Fortune 500 company with revenues of $27.9 billion for the fiscal year 2015. For more information, visit www.avnet.com.