Xilinx Announces Zynq-7000 Family, Industry's First Scalable Processing Platform

Dual ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processing system integrated with programmable logic,
Extending Embedded System Architecture for High Performance and Scalability

Xilinx Korea (Country Manager Heung-sik Ahn) March 3, 2011 – Xilinx announced the Zynq™-7000 family, the industry's first scalable processing platform. This family was developed to deliver the processing and computational performance required by high-end embedded applications targeting markets such as video surveillance, automotive driver support, and factory automation. Supported by a diverse ecosystem of tools and IP providers, the Zynq-7000 family enables system designers and embedded software developers to customize, optimize, and differentiate their systems by integrating entire ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ processor-based systems into 28nm low-power programmable logic.

Ralf Schäffer, Project Leader at Agilent’s Life Sciences Group, stated, “Agilent has been exploring the potential to reduce costs and PCB space by integrating processors and FPGAs on a single die for over 10 years. While several companies have attempted this, they have not yet achieved the perfect integration that meets our goals.” “Finally, this long-held wish has become a reality with Xilinx’s Zynq-7000 family,” he said. “In other words, it means that Agilent can now produce a wide range of product variations, from low-end to high-end, on a single common code base with minimal cost and engineering expenses.”

Each Zynq-7000 EPP device features a hard-wired ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore processing system, NEON, and Double Precision Floating Point units, as well as L1 and L2 caches, a memory controller, and common peripherals. This processing system boots immediately upon power-on and can run various operating systems regardless of programmable logic. The processing system can reconfigure programmable logic whenever necessary.

Application developers can leverage the rich parallel processing capabilities of this programmable logic to handle large amounts of data in various signal processing applications, and can also extend the functionality of the processing system by implementing additional peripherals. The high-bandwidth AMBA®4 Advanced Scalable Interface (AXI4™) interconnect between the processing system and the programmable logic enables multi-gigabit data transmission even at very low power, eliminating performance bottlenecks common to control, data, I/O, and memory.

familiar programming environment
The Zynq-7000 family accelerates time-to-market by providing an open design environment that facilitates parallel software development for dual-core Cortex-A9 processor-based systems and custom accelerators in programmable logic. Software developers can utilize the Eclipse environment, Xilinx Platform Studio (SDK), ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5™), and ARM RealView Development Suite (RVDS™). Additionally, they can leverage compilers, debuggers, and applications from industry-leading vendors in the ARM Connected Community® and Xilinx Alliance program ecosystem, such as Lauterbach, Wind River, PetaLogix, MathWorks, Mentor Graphics, Micum, and Montavista.

At the same time, Xilinx can maximize system-level performance and application-specific requirements tailored to the programmable fabric of the Zynq-7000 family using the award-winning ISE® Design Suite. This creates a comprehensive hardware development environment capable of accelerating design and verification, including development tools, AMBA4 AXI4 plug-and-play IP, and Bus Functional Models (BFM). Following Xilinx's acquisition of AutoESL, a leader in high-level synthesis, further enhancements are being made to tools that provide C, C++, and SystemC synthesis tailored to the Zynq-7000 device architecture. In future releases, key algorithms will be able to move more seamlessly between the processors and programmable logic of the Zynq-7000 family.

Over time, these solutions will be augmented by the ARM Connected Community and third-party vendors within the Xilinx Alliance program, providing a critical productive development environment as part of Xilinx’s Target Design Platform, which includes IP, reference designs, development kits, and other resources targeting specific applications and design principles.

Integrated Programmable Logic Architecture
The programmable logic of the Zynq-7000 family is based on Xilinx's latest 7 Series FPGA architecture, guaranteeing 100% compatibility in terms of IP, tools, and performance across all 28nm generation devices. The smallest Zynq-7000 devices, the Zynq-7010 and Zynq-7020, are based on the Artix™-7 family, which is optimized for low cost and low power. The larger Zynq-7030 and Zynq-7040 devices