Berlin, Germany (January 28, 2010) – Today, team Part-Time-Scientists announced Xilinx Inc. as an official sponsor of the team. The semiconductor industry leader is the world’s biggest provider of programmable platforms. As inventor of the first commercially viable field programmable gate array (FPGA) Xilinx provides the Part-Time-Scientists with technology and know how that put rovers on Mars and help create ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) at CERN. Team Part-Time-Scientists, headquartered in Berlin, Germany with 38 team members is among 21 teams from 18 countries that are competing for their share of the $30 million prize purse.

“We’re happy to have a sponsor like Xilinx which approaches innovative projects with the same enthusiasm like us. Together we want to set a new standard for embedded development and high-frequency communications. We always use the most cutting edge technology available on the market. Having Xilinx as a sponsor is tremendous. With the wide variety of space grade circuits on their résumé our development will improve even further” said Team Leader Robert Boehme.

Xilinx Inc. joins the ever growing list of sponsors of the team Part-Time-Scientists. Among them is another semiconductor industry giant, Texas Instruments. For a complete list of the teams sponsors visit our Partners section

For more information about team Part-Time-Scientists, please visit High resolution photographs, video and other team materials are available upon request.

ABOUT XILINX
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions. For more information, click “here”: http://www.xilinx.com.

ABOUT THE GOOGLE LUNAR X PRIZE
The $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE is an unprecedented international competition that challenges and inspires engineers and entrepreneurs from around the world to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. The $30 million prize purse is segmented into a $20 million Grand Prize, a $5 million Second Prize and $5 million in bonus prizes. To win the Grand Prize, a team must successfully soft land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon, rove on the lunar surface for a minimum of 500 meters, and transmit a specific set of video, images and data back to the Earth. The Grand Prize is $20 million until December 31st 2012; thereafter it will drop to $15 million until December 31st 2014 at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation. For more information about the Google Lunar X PRIZE, please visit.

ABOUT THE X PRIZE FOUNDATION
The X PRIZE Foundation is an educational nonprofit prize institute whose mission is to create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. In 2004, the Foundation captured the world’s attention when the Burt Rutan-led team, backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built and flew the world’s first private spaceship to win the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for suborbital spaceflight. The Foundation has since launched the $10 million Archon X PRIZE for Genomics, the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE and the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE. The Foundation, with the support of its partner, BT Global Services, is creating prizes in Space and Ocean Exploration, Life Sciences, Energy and Environment, Education and Global Development. The Foundation is widely recognized as a leader in fostering innovation through competition. For more information, please visit.