Xilinx Unveils ARM-based Processing Architecture

Xilinx Inc. has announced the architecture for a new Extensible Processing Platform that will deliver unrivaled levels of system performance, flexibility and integration to developers of a wide variety of embedded systems. The ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor-based platform enables system architects and embedded software developers to apply a combination of serial and parallel processing to address the challenging system requirements presented by the global demand for embedded systems to perform increasingly complex functions.

The Xilinx Extensible Processing Platform offers embedded systems designers a processor-centric design and development approach for achieving the compute and processing horsepower required to drive tasks involving high-speed access to real-time inputs, high-performance processing and complex digital signal processing—or any combination thereof—needed to meet their application-specific requirements, including lower cost and power.

“Today’s embedded software developer is being tasked to build complex applications that require tremendous levels of system performance, and they need to deliver that performance within tightly managed cost, schedule and power budgets,” said Vin Ratford, Xilinx Senior Vice President for Worldwide Marketing and Business Development. “By creating an architecture within a familiar ARM processor-based development framework, this new Extensible Processing Platform can be the engine of innovation for many design teams held back today by performance bottlenecks.”

A software-centric development flow is enabled by a processor-centric approach which presents a full processor system—including caches, memory controllers and commonly used connectivity and I/O peripherals—that boots and can run a variety of operating systems (OS) at power-up, such as Linux, Wind River’s VxWorks and Micrium’s uC-OSII. The ARM architecture and its Connected Community ecosystem further maximize productivity for developers of embedded systems, while unrivaled performance is achieved by Xilinx’s architecting the subsystem around ARM’s dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore processors, each running at up to 800MHz, combined with the parallel-processing capabilities of Xilinx’s high-performance, low-power 28nm programmable logic. The programmable logic is tightly coupled with the processor system through the high-bandwidth AMBA-AXI interconnects to accelerate key system functions by up to 100x, using off-the-shelf and/or custom IP. This architectural approach addresses common performance bottlenecks between these parallel and serial computing environments, memory and I/O. It also gives the processor system configuration control of the programmable logic, including dynamic reconfiguration.

“Taking advantage of the parallelism of programmable logic is an excellent method for overcoming cost and power challenges in systems that require significant levels of high performance,” said Simon Segars, President, ARM. “Xilinx’s new architecture abstracts much of the hardware burden away from the embedded software developers’ point of view, giving them an unprecedented level of control in the development process.”

Software developers can leverage their existing system code based on ARM technology and utilize vast off-the-shelf open-source and commercially available software component libraries. Because the system boots an OS at reset, software development can get under way quickly within familiar development and debug environments using tools such as ARM’s RealView development suite and related third-party tools, Eclipse-based IDEs, GNU, the Xilinx Software Development Kit and others.

Xilinx


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