iVeia announces availability of Android distribution for Zynq-7000 EPP

SAN JOSE, USA: iVeia announced the availability of their Android Board Support Package distribution for the ZC702 Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP) Reference Design from Xilinx.

A demonstration can be seen at the Xilinx booth, #1708 at Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2012 between March 27th and March 29th. The Zynq-7000 EPP combines an industry-standard ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 processing system with Xilinx 28nm scalable optimized programmable logic architecture.

A popular operating system for handhelds and tablets, Android is typically found in low-power high-performance architectures. The marriage of Android and Zynq-7000 EPP is made possible by the low static and dynamic power of the dual ARM processors and Xilinx's 28nm programmable logic.

"Zynq-7000 EPP offers great value for our applications, as these devices consume considerably less power than two-chip processor plus FPGA configurations for the same application," says Michael Fawcett, CTO of iVeia. "We're able to further reduce power and cost by leveraging the extensibility of the Zynq architecture to integrate typical Android peripherals within the device that would otherwise consume extra I/O power and board real-estate as discrete devices."

iVeia also unveiled its plans for their Velocity-PDE for the Android product, a commercial Android distribution and tool suite for developing custom embedded hardware and programmable logic systems based on Android. "Android is attractive for embedded applications due to its rich features, global community acceptance, and open-source application development," he explains. "If you are developing a generic phone or tablet, Android is your clear choice. However, after trudging through three or four different Android ports for our embedded customers, we identified a real industry need for an 'Embedded Android'. So, we started developing the Velocity-PDE."

"Many customers are asking us to support Embedded Android as part of the overall Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform product offering," said Mark Jensen, director, Processing Platforms Marketing, "By working closely with iVeia as part of our early access program, we can readily support development of Android applications that take advantage of the processing power and scalability enabled by the Zynq-7000 EPP."

iVeia is presently working with key customers running Android 2.3 distro on the ZC702 platform and their Zynq based Atlas I-Z7e and Arcadia development platforms.
A free and open source Android project for Zynq-7000 EPP is expected to launch in Q2 of 2012. The Android project is sponsored by iVeia. iVeia's Velocity-PDE is expected to be available to beta customers in Q4 of 2012.