Xilinx and Gibson Guitar Claim First True Digital Guitar

Announced at the AES show today – a press release from Xilinx:

Gibson Guitar and Xilinx, Inc. announced a collaboration that resulted in the industry’s first electric guitar to deliver true digital sound. Gibson developed a way, through their internally derived MaGIC digital transfer protocol, to take the traditional analog output from the guitar and convert it into a digital signal, providing real time high-fidelity digital audio to benefit both production and live performances. Gibson credits Xilinx’s reprogrammable Spartan-IIE FPGAs as an enabling critical component in its groundbreaking guitar and plans to utilize FPGA chips in a variety of MaGIC-enabled applications. Xilinx’s Spartan-IIE FPGA is the world’s lowest cost programmable device available today.

Gibson will offer MaGIC, an acronym for Media-accelerated Global Information Carrier, in every Gibson guitar within the next 12-18 months. MaGIC applies the digital technology invented for computer network products and adapts them to the audio network. This requires adaptability of the MaGIC standard, made possible by using a programmable versus fixed logic solution.

“Multiple uses of MaGIC would not have been financially or technically possible using traditional ASIC fixed logic. An ASIC platform would have required the design to be re-spun each time a change was made,” said Gibson Chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, who spearheaded MaGIC development. “The programmable nature of Xilinx FPGAs not only provided a flexible high performance design platform for Gibson, it also provided the low cost silicon solution we needed to make it happen.”

“Xilinx FPGA technology is helping to shape the future of the digital age by harnessing the flexibility of a programmable device at cost points available to consumer products,” said Clay Johnson, vice president and general manager of the General Products division at Xilinx. “Gibson’s bleeding edge MaGIC technology is a perfect example of our desire to bring the digital age to the consumer market.”…