Xilinx's first 7 series FPGA target design platform is available

Xilinx announced the launch of its first targeted design platforms to accelerate the development and integration capabilities of 28nm 7-series FPGA systems. Xilinx's targeted design platform approach to FPGA system design and integration offers the industry's most comprehensive development kit, including development boards, ISE design kit tools, IP cores, reference designs, and FPGA sandwich cards (FMCS) to help designers start application development immediately.

During DesignCon 2012, attendees can visit Xilinx booth (booth No. 732) to see Xilinx's new Virtex®-7 FPGA VC707 evaluation kit, Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 evaluation Kit, And a demonstration of the Kintex-7 FPGA DSP suite, developed jointly with Avnet Electronic Marketing, Running applications demonstrate the low power consumption, FMC portability, high-speed connectivity, and advanced digital signal processing (DSP) performance benefits of these kits. Xilinx also demonstrated the industry's unique Flexible mixed-signal (AMS) analog interface feature, which is now available in all Xilinx 28nm devices to support universal analog integration.

Vin Ratford, senior vice president of Global marketing at Xylinx, said: "Xylinx's 7 Series products further extend FPGA technology to SoC applications that were previously only possible in the world of time-consuming and expensive ASics or ASSPs. "The introduction of Xilinx's ground-breaking and innovative 28nm technology means customers now have access to a base platform and domain-specific platforms, as well as a rich ecosystem of products to meet system evaluation, development and deployment needs, taking full advantage of the low power consumption and flexibility of the 7 Series FPGA."

Since delivering the first Kintex-7 devices to customers in March 2011, Xilinx has begun rolling out the Kintex-325T, Virtex-485T, Virtex-2000T FPgas and Zynq-7020 scalable processing platforms. These three new kits are the first of nearly 40 that Xilinx and ecosystem partner members will soon launch to support embedded and high-speed connectivity applications that address the automotive, broadcast, consumer, industrial and communications markets. The reference designs that come with each kit provide an ideal starting point for both FPGA novices and experienced designers to get the job done quickly while achieving the best performance, lowest power consumption and highest bandwidth, and taking full advantage of the rich features of Xilinx FPGas.

Ecosystem support and open standards

Xilinx Alliance program members include hundreds of development board, design services, IP core and tool manufacturers, can provide a rich development solutions and applications for Xilinx target design platform. Xilinx works closely with 4DSP, Analog Devices (ADI), Avnet Electronics Marketing, Northwest Logic, Mathworks, Texas Instruments (TI) and Xylon, Together, we brought the first Kintex-7 FPGas and Virtex-7 FPGA development kits to market, with additional support from ecosystem partners in the future.

Xilinx's adoption and support of open standards throughout the design and development process will further strengthen the Xilinx Alliance program, enabling it to cost-effectively roll out key technologies that will make it easier for FPGA users to complete their project designs.

Each development kit supports the FMC specification. Developed by VITA 57, this specification is an important part of the target design platform and provides industry-standard subcard sizes, connectors, and module interfaces for FPgas on the base board. Whether FMC cards are custom or off-the-shelf commercial (COTS) cards from Xilinx ecosystem partners, developers can instantly adopt hundreds of existing FMCS or reuse cards purchased for previous generations of Virtex-6 and Spartan®-6 devices.

In addition to open standards support at the board level, Xilinx uses the AMBA® AXI4™ (Advanced eXtensible Interface 4) standard for plug and play and reuse of IP cores to further increase productivity. With ISE's PlanAhead Design Planner, developers can adopt a unified design process for logic, DSP, and embedded processing, which not only simplifies IP assembly, but also takes advantage of team design with FPGA layered processes.