At DesignCon 2012, improving system performance and reducing power consumption
Unveiled the industry's first complete development kit that reduces Bill of Materials using 28nm FPGA technology

Xilinx Korea (Country Manager Ahn Heung-sik) February 1, 2012 – Xilinx has launched the industry's first Targeted Design Platform (TDP) to shorten system development and integration times with its 28nm 7 Series FPGAs. With the TDP approach to FPGA system design and integration, Xilinx provides the industry's most comprehensive development kit, complete with boards, ISE design suite tools, IP cores, reference designs, and FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) support, enabling designers to immediately begin application development.

At DesignCon 2012, visitors to Xilinx’s booth (#732) can see demonstrations of low power, FMC migration, high-speed connectivity, and advanced DSP performance by running applications with the new Virtex®-7 FPGA VC707 evaluation kit, the KINTEX-7 FPGA KC705 evaluation kit, and the KINTEX®-7 FPGA DSP kit developed in collaboration with Avnet Electronic Marketing. Additionally, there will be a demonstration of the industry's only Agile Mixed Signal (AMS) analog interface performance currently available on all Xilinx 28nm devices, enabling general-purpose analog integration.

Vin Ratford, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Xilinx, said, “Xilinx’s 7 Series family extends FPGA technology to SoC applications that were previously impossible without the time-consuming and expensive development of ASICs or ASSPs. Xilinx is launching its 28nm generation products in earnest, and thus customers can now utilize base and domain platforms, along with a range of ecosystem products for system evaluation, development, and deployment that leverage the low power and flexibility provided by the 7 Series FPGAs.”

Since the launch of the first KINTEX-7 device in March 2011, Xilinx has embarked on the full-scale launch of the KINTEX-325T, Virtex-485T, Virtex-2000T FPGAs, and the Zynq-7020 EPP (Extensible Processing Platform). These three new kits are the first of approximately 40 products to be offered by Xilinx and its ecosystem members, supporting embedded and high-speed connectivity applications across markets including automotive, broadcast, consumer, industrial, and telecommunications. The reference designs included in all kits provide an ideal starting point for both novice and experienced FPGA users to reduce design time while leveraging the highest performance, lowest power consumption, highest bandwidth, and the wide range of capabilities of Xilinx FPGAs.

Ecosystem support and open standards
Over 100 board, design service, IP core, and tool vendors participating in the Xilinx Alliance Program are providing a wide variety of solutions and applications that enable Xilinx TDP. Xilinx has been working closely with 4DSP Inc., Analog Devices, Avnet, Digilent Inc., Northwest Logic, MathWorks, Texas Instruments, and Xylon to launch the first KINTEX-7 FPGA and Virtex-7 FPGA development kits and to expand subsequent support for the ecosystem.

Xilinx’s adoption and support of open standards throughout the design and development flow is further strengthening the Xilinx Alliance program’s ability to efficiently and cost-effectively provide core technologies that enable FPGA users to complete their projects much more easily.

All development kits support the FMC specification, one of the key TDP enablers defined by the VITA 57, which provides a modular interface to FPGAs on industry-standard daughter card form factors, connectors, and baseboards. Whether using custom cards or commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products from the Xilinx ecosystem, developers can immediately utilize over 100 existing FMCs or reuse their investments in previous generation Virtex-6 and Spartan®-6 devices.

In addition to widely supported open standards, Xilinx further enhances productivity by adopting the AMBA® AXI4™ (Advanced eXtensible Interface 4) standard, which enables the use of plug-and-play capabilities and the reuse of IP cores. By using the Plan-Ahead design planner available in ISE, you can secure an integrated design process for logic, DSP, and embedded processing that simplifies the IP assembly process and facilitates team design with a hierarchical flow within the FPGA.

Introducing the new kit
• The KINTEX-7 FPGA KC705 Evaluation Kit provides a flexible framework for high-level system designs utilizing DDR3, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express, and other serial connectivity standards. By using the AMS header, designers can explore AMS technology and discover how its capabilities can reduce BOM costs. Other communication features, such as high-speed GTX transceivers and SFP+ and SMA connectors, further expand the advanced capabilities available for evaluation and utilization with this platform. (Currently available for order at $1,695)
• The KINTEX-7 FPGA DSP Kit was co-developed with Avnet Electronics Marketing. It features the KINTEX-7 FPGA KC705 board and includes an integrated high-speed analog FMC that interfaces with actual signals. Equipped with a dual-channel 800MSPS 16-bit DAC and a dual-channel 250MSPS 14-bit ADC, this high-speed analog module provides exceptional throughput when combined with the massive parallel processing bandwidth of the KINTEX-7 FPGA's DSP48E1 arithmetic engine. Utilizing the industry-standard AXI4 interface convention, it can be integrated into systems by creating data paths for DSP slices. (Currently available for order at Avnet for $3,995)
The Virtex-7 FPGA VC707 evaluation kit provides designers with an easy starting point for evaluating and utilizing devices that offer groundbreaking performance, capacity, and power efficiency. This kit is the optimal choice for high-end systems requiring top-tier performance and maximum bandwidth connectivity. This kit accelerates the development time of designs that utilize the full bandwidth of the Virtex-7 FPGA while providing best-in-class power efficiency with 50% reduced power consumption compared to previous generation devices. (Expected to be available for order starting mid-February 2012 for $3,495)