Platforms speed up 7 series FPGA designs

Xilinx, Inc. has launched its first Targeted Design Platforms for accelerating systems development and integration with its 28nm 7 series Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Xilinx's Targeted Design Platform approach to FPGA system design and integration provides a comprehensive development kit – complete with boards, ISE Design Suite tools, IP cores, reference designs and FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) support.

"Xilinx's 7 series families take FPGA technology further into SoC applications that were never possible before without costly and time-consuming ASIC or ASSP development," said Vin Ratford, senior vice president, World Wide Marketing at Xilinx. "Xilinx is executing a record-breaking rollout of its 28nm generation, which means customers now have access to base and domain platforms as well as a range of ecosystem offerings for evaluating, developing and deploying systems that take advantage of the low-power and flexibility 7 series FPGAs bring to the table."

Each development kit supports the FMC specification, a key Targeted Design Platform enabler defined by VITA 57 that delivers an industry standard daughter card form factor, connector and modular interface to an FPGA located on a base board. Whether the cards are custom made or commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) from the Xilinx ecosystem, developers can leverage 100's of existing FMCs immediately, or reuse their investments in cards targeting previous generation Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 devices.

In addition to the open standards supported at the board level, Xilinx's adoption of the AMBA AXI4 (Advanced eXtensible Interface 4) standard enables plug-and-play use and reuse of Intellectual Property (IP) cores to further accelerate productivity. Using the PlanAhead design planner available in the ISE Design Suite, developers have a unified design process for logic, DSP and embedded processing that simplifies the IP assembly process and promotes team design with hierarchical flows within the FPGA.

The Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 Evaluation Kit provides a flexible framework for designing higher-level systems using DDR3, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express, and other serial connectivity standards. An AMS header lets designers explore the AMS technology and see how the feature can trim BOM cost. Other communications features—high-speed GTX transceivers, SFP+, and SMA connectors—further extend the list of advanced capabilities that can be evaluated and leveraged from this platform.

The Kintex-7 FPGA DSP Kit features the Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 board and includes an integrated high-speed analog FMC to interface to real-world signals. Featuring dual-channel 800 MSPS 16-bit digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and dual-channel 250 MSPS 14-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), the high-speed analog module delivers exceptional throughput when combined with the massively parallel processing bandwidth of the DSP48E1 arithmetic processing engines in the Kintex-7 FPGA. Data paths to and from the DSP slices can be created and integrated into systems using industry-standard AXI4 interface conventions.

The Virtex-7 FPGA VC707 Evaluation Kit gives designers an easy starting point for evaluating and leveraging devices that deliver breakthrough performance, capacity and power efficiency. The kit is the optimal choice for advanced systems that need the highest performance and highest bandwidth connectivity. The kit speeds the development of designs that can leverage the full breadth of Virtex-7 FPGAs, all of which offer maximum power efficiency—requiring 50 percent less power than previous generation devices.


Xilinx, Inc.