Xilinx Announces Extensible Processing Platform

Xilinx Inc. has unveiled the Zynq-7000 family, the industry's first Extensible Processing Platform (EPP) developed to achieve the levels of processing and compute performance required in high-end embedded applications targeting markets such as video surveillance, automotive driver assistance, factory automation, and many others. Supported by an extensive ecosystem of tools and IP providers, the Zynq-7000 family tightly integrates a complete ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor-based system with 28nm, low-power programmable logic for system architects and embedded software developers to extend, customize, optimize, and differentiate their systems.

Each Zynq-7000 EPP device is built with an ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore processing system with NEON and Double Precision Floating Point engines that is fully integrated and hardwired, and includes L1 and L2 caches, memory controllers, and commonly used peripherals. The processing system boots at power-up and can run a variety of operating systems independent of the programmable logic. The processing system then configures the programmable logic on an as needed basis. With this approach, the software programming model is exactly the same as standard, fully featured ARM processor-based SoCs.

Application developers can take advantage of the programmable logic's massive parallel processing to handle large amounts of data across a wide range of signal processing applications, as well as extend the features of the processing system by implementing additional peripherals. High-bandwidth AMBA4 Advanced Extensible Interface (AXI4) interconnect between the processing system and the programmable logic enables multi-gigabit data transfers at very low power, thereby eliminating common performance bottlenecks for control, data, I/O, and memory.

The Zynq-7000 family accelerates time to market by providing an open design environment that facilitates parallel development of software for the dual-core Cortex-A9 processor-based system and custom accelerators in the programmable logic. Software developers can leverage the Eclipse environment, 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, such as Lauterbach, Wind River, PetaLogix, The MathWorks, Mentor Graphics, Micrium, and MontaVista.

In parallel, the Zynq-7000 family's programmable fabric can be tailored to maximize system level performance and application specific requirements, leveraging Xilinx's award winning ISE Design Suite, which provides a comprehensive hardware development environment that includes development tools and AMBA4 AXI4 Plug-and-Play intellectual property (IP) and Bus Functional Models (BFM) to accelerate design and verification. Following Xilinx's acquisition of high level synthesis leader AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc., further tool enhancements are underway to provide C, C++ and SystemC synthesis optimized for the Zynq-7000 device architecture. Future releases will also enable a more seamless movement of key algorithms between the processors and the programmable logic of the Zynq-7000 family.

Over time, these solutions will be augmented by third-party vendors within the ARM Connected Community and Xilinx Alliance Program as part of Xilinx's Targeted Design Platform approach to provide an over-arching productive development environment that includes IP, reference designs, development kits, and other resources targeting specific applications and design disciplines.

Xilinx