Xilinx ships first Zynq-7000 devices

ARM European Technical Conference 2011, PARIS, FRANCE: Xilinx Inc. announced its first Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP) shipments to customers, a major milestone in the roll-out of a complete embedded processing platform that for the first time offers developers ASIC levels of performance and power consumption, the flexibility of an FPGA and the programmability of a microprocessor.

Customers who have developed systems using the Zynq-7000 EPP emulation platform, early access Xilinx hardware tools and standard software tools supported by the ARM® Connected Community, are now migrating their applications to these first devices and beginning the next stages of their product development.

Xilinx is showcasing the first public demonstration of a Zynq-7000 EPP at the ARM European Technical Conference, where attendees can see the device running a Linux-based application.

"It's exciting to see early access customers take what they've accomplished since we first launched the Extensible Processing Platform program in April 2010 and apply their systems to these first devices," said Lawrence Getman, VP of Processing at Xilinx. "We are able to give them a significant time to market advantage in their development and introduction of new products that require the unrivaled levels of system performance, flexibility and integration offered by this new class of system-on-chip."

For systems that need to support applications which require high, real-time performance, the Zynq-7000 EPP delivers levels of performance that go beyond what traditional processing solutions can implement. Emulation platforms, hardware development tools, Open Source Linux support and the recently announced Extensible Virtual Platform developed jointly with Cadence Design Systems Inc. all help to make developing and implementing Zynq-7000 EPP systems possible. A growing list of OS support is adding to an expanding ecosystem offering embedded tool and software development solutions.

"Participating in the Early Access Program gave National Instruments the opportunity to jump start development to make it possible for NI LabVIEW system design software to program both the high performance processor and programmable fabric present in the Zynq-7000 EPP with a single development environment," said Jamie Smith, director of Embedded Systems Product Marketing at National Instruments. "Now that we've received the silicon, we'll continue our development toward providing control and monitoring systems to our customers leveraging the increased capabilities of the Zynq-7000 devices."

The Zynq-7000 family combines an industry-standard ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore processing system with Xilinx's scalable 28nm programmable logic architecture. It supports parallel development of software for the dual-core Cortex-A9 processor-based system and custom accelerators and peripherals in the programmable logic. Software developers can leverage the open source Eclipse platform, Xilinx Platform Studio Software Development Kit (SDK), ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5) and ARM RealView Development Suite (RVDS), or compilers, debuggers, and applications from leading vendors within the ARM Connected Community and Xilinx Alliance Program ecosystems.

Customers can go to vendors such as Enea Services Linkoping AB, Express Logic, Inc., Lauterbach Datentechnik GmbH, The MathWorks, PetaLogix, Mentor Graphics Corp., Micrium, and Wind River Systems for their development solutions.

"When we looked at the possibility of leveraging our processor based development investments across different product lines, the Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform's combination of processor and programmable logic became a clear choice for several of our applications," said Bernd Liebetrau, head of CoC Digital Integration at Rohde & Schwarz. "The platform approach allows us to customize each device to meet our various application needs while at the same time enabling us to leverage the software developments over multiple products. Rohde & Schwarz has always been at the forefront of technology and being an early adopter and receiving early samples of the Zynq-7000 EPP is a significant milestone for us."

Developers can tailor the Zynq-7000 family's programmable logic to maximize system level performance and efficiently address application specific requirements. Xilinx's award-winning ISE Design Suite provides a comprehensive hardware development environment that includes development tools and AMBA 4 Advanced Extensible Interface (AXI) bus protocol-compliant Plug-and-Play intellectual property (IP) cores as well as Bus Functional Models (BFM) to accelerate design and verification.

"We've been heavily focused on the development of our Zynq-7000 EPP products and IP over the past several months," says Michael Fawcett, CTO of iVeia, "So, naturally, we were very excited to receive our first Zynq-7020 devices. Our Atlas-I-Z7e will be the first computer-on-module to host a Zynq device and will drop into existing sockets for Android handheld, digital radio, and video processing applications. We fully expect to be able to demonstrate such applications within a few months, a credit to Xilinx's early access support, tools, and emulation platform."

Addressing evolving market needs
To meet new customer requirements in high-end applications targeting Wired, Wireless and Video Broadcast markets, Xilinx is also announcing the replacement of the Zynq-7040 device with the new Zynq-7045 device to extend the family's range of twelve, 12.5 Gbps transceiver technology to sixteen. This will enable further bridging applications and wider connections to high speed DAC/ADCs.

The increased programmable logic capacity (DSP, BRAM and Logic) will offer designers greater signal processing capability for functions such as filtering, digital conversions, and more, as well as greater opportunities for customizing specific functions. The Zynq-7045 device becomes the new high end of the Zynq-7000 family that spans from 30k logic cells to target the most cost sensitive industrial, automotive and consumer applications, all the way up to 350k logic cells for the applications requiring the highest capacity and performance in a single scalable platform.