Xcell Journal Issue 78: Charge to Market with Xilinx 7 Series ...

COVER STORY
CUSTOMER INNOVATION
have to go to the vendor’s website to
search for documentation and IP that’s
appropriate for your chip and board.
In most cases, you’ll be lucky if you
find even basic building blocks. And if
you do, they are often out of date.
Some vendors may even require that
you purchase standard IP blocks just
to get up and running. Buying a kit at
some vendors is a lot like buying a car
without tires—you can sit in the driver’s
seat and turn it on, but you can’t
drive it anywhere.”
Worse, many chip vendors offer a
dizzying array of kits with overlapping
purposes. That, he said, makes it hard
for the user to discern which one is
best, while at the same time making it
difficult for the vendor to offer quality
support. “With the Targeted Design
Platform approach, Xilinx is offering a
lot more than what folks find in a typical
kit,” said Moran. “Instead of a car with
no tires, we are offering the board equivalent
to a Ferrari that has race tires
installed, a full tank of gas, is tuned up
and ready to go—ready to go fast.”
Evan Leal, senior product marketing
manager, Targeted Design Platforms, at
Xilinx, said that in addition to the
board, connectors and design software,
Targeted Design Platform kits include
multiple types of reference designs,
free IP and, in some cases, bundled
FMC cards. There is immediate access
to IP libraries and a catalog of plug-and-
FOCUS ON DIFFERENTIATION
WIRED, WIRELESS, BROADCAST, DEFENSE, CONSUMER AND MORE
EMBEDDED, DSP, CONNECTIVITY, ANALOG, VIDEO
DOMAIN IP, DOMAIN TOOLS, FMC RADIO DAUGHTERCARDS
ARTIX KINTEX VIRTEX
BASE IP, ISE DESIGN SUITE, BASE BOARDS
Figure 1 – The Xilinx Targeted Design Platform concept allows users to focus their design efforts
on product differentiation and get products to market quickly.
play FMC daughtercards from Xilinx
and third-party vendors. “Because this
is our second TDP generation, we
already have in place a very formidable
ecosystem to support these new kits,”
said Moran. “Further, with this generation
of devices we’ve made it even easier
for customers to get up and running
quickly.” The hundreds of board, design
service, IP and tool vendors that make
up the Xilinx Alliance Program
(http://www.xilinx.com/alliance/index
.htm) provide a rich diversity of solutions
and applications that enable
Xilinx Targeted Design Platforms.
Xilinx worked closely with 4DSP Inc.,
Analog Devices Inc., Avnet, Northwest
Logic, The Mathworks, Texas
Instruments and Xylon to bring the
Kintex-7 FPGA and Virtex-7 FPGA
kits to market.
PLUG-AND-PLAY FMC CARDS
In fact, one of the keys to Xilinx’s TDP
approach is the industry-standard FMC
connectors on all kits starting with
those supporting Virtex-6 and Spartan ® -
6 FPGA families. The addition of FMC
connectors allows IP vendors, fellow
chip makers and design services companies
to field daughtercards that
designers can use to quickly connect
boards to Xilinx kits and test their
designs within a system-level context.
Moran said that since its launch
with the 6 series in 2009, the TDP
CUSTOMER DESIGN
MARKET-SPECIFIC
DOMAIN-SPECIFIC
BASE PLATFORM
ecosystem now boasts more than 100
FMC cards from over 30 partners. In
recent months, Xilinx has held
plugfests in which more than 30 of
these FMCs have been verified to
work with the new 7 series platforms,
covering a wide range of applications.
In the coming months Xilinx anticipates
a greater number of FMC cards
will become available.
The 7 series also lends some inherent
improvements to the TDP strategy.
For example, Moran points out that
with the introduction of the 7 series
devices last year, Xilinx embraced the
ARM ® AMBA ® AXI4 interface. AXI4
allows users to more easily integrate
Xilinx, third-party and internally
developed IP into Xilinx 7 series
devices. It also allows customers and
the Xilinx IP ecosystem to focus on
one IP interconnect structure rather
than several, so as to refine IP offerings
and develop new ones faster.
Another key benefit of the new-generation
TDPs comes from the fact that
Xilinx implemented all its 7 series
devices—the Virtex-7, Kintex-7 and
Artix-7—as well as the Zynq-7000
Extensible Processing Platform
devices on a scalable programmable
logic architecture. Moran said this unified
architecture allows users to implement
their IP and migrate their designs
more easily between FPGA families as
their design requirements evolve. This
10 Xcell Journal First Quarter 2012