Xilinx announced that it has joined the Multicore Association (MCA) OpenAMP group. The association was established to open a standards body to improve productivity and time-to-market required for heterogeneous system development. Markus Levy, chairman of the Multicore Association, stated, "We applaud Xilinx's efforts in establishing and advancing the new MCA OpenAMP group, as Xilinx has extensive experience in FPGA and SoC-based solutions for heterogeneous system development."

Xilinx's OpenAMP framework simplifies heterogeneous system development and fully supports OpenAMP implementation in the mass production of the industry's only 16nm multiprocessing Zynq® UltraScale+™ MPSoC devices.

This OpenAMP framework supports excellent interoperability and communication between FreeRTOS and the Linux operating system (OS) in Xilinx's standalone environment. The Linux OS can run on ARM® A53 or R5 cores on Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC and on ARM A9 on Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC.

Additionally, OpenAMP supports the Mentor Graphics Multicore Framework with integrated Nucleus RTOS support, Mentor Embedded Linux, BareMetal, Mentor Embedded Hypervisor, and Sourcery Codebench development environment. Furthermore, the framework also supports commercial OS including Micrium's μC/OS-II and μC/OS-III.

Tomas Evensen, embedded software CTO at Xilinx, stated, "The MCA OpenAMP group will contribute to establishing standards that enable OpenAMP framework-based technology to be easily and rapidly adopted in the multicore industry," and added, "Through this standard, Xilinx's OpenAMP implementation can help customers build more robust systems in a short period of time."