FPGA firm, Xilinx has made its biggest attempt yet to be a supplier of application specific standard parts (ASSPs) to markets ranging from video systems to comsumer.
The company has announced a family of system-on-chip devices based on a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor.
There is programmable logic available on the chips, but Xilinx is presenting the Zynq -7000 series as not just another family of FPGA devices.
“We do not think of this as a family of FPGAs,” said Stephane Monboisset, senior manager for processing platforms marketing at Xilinx.
“These are closer to ASSPs than to FPGAs, they are ARM processor-based system devices with some, tightly coupled, programmable logic on the side,” said Monboisset.
The reason for playing down the programmable character of the devices is to compete with other ARM Cortex processor-based ASSP suppliers like Freescale and Texas Instruments. This means convincing designers the devices do not have the high cost and useability barriers of FPGAs.
The Zynq 7010, with a dual-core Cortex-A9 running at 800MHz and 30,000 programmable logic cells, will sell for less than $15 in volume.
Like other ASSP suppliers, Xilinx is relying on the strength of the ARM ecosystem with its supporting design tools and IP.
Each Zynq-7000 device is built with an ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore processing system with NEON and double precision floating point units. There are L1 and L2 caches, memory controllers, and commonly used peripherals.
Another feature which distinguishes these devices from FPGAs is the processor will boot-up at power-on and run its operating system independent of the programmable logic.
The intention is to side-step the FPGA’s reputation for requiring specialist programming.
The processing system then configures the programmable logic as it is needed for example for parallel processing, acceleration and I/O configuration.
“This means the software programming model is exactly the same as standard, fully featured ARM processor-based SoCs,” said Monboisset.
There is significant programmable logic on these chips, which is tightly coupled to the processor using a multi-gigabit interface, the AMBA 4 AXI4 bus, developed in collaboration with ARM.
The largest Zynq-7030 and Zynq-7040 devices include between four and twelve10.3Gbit/s transceiver channels and a PCI Express Gen2 block for high-speed off-chip connectivity.
But all 4 devices in the family have a dual 12-bit 1Msample/s ADC block.
The devices will be fabbed on a 28nm process when they go into production in 2012. Sampling will start by the end of this year.
There are Xilinx and ARM development kits as well as compilers, debuggers, and applications from ecosystem partners such as Lauterbach, Wind River, PetaLogix, The MathWorks, Mentor Graphics, Micrium, and MontaVista.