Date: 05/02/2012

Xilinx launches reference design material and kits for its 28nm FPGA chips

Xilinx has launched its first Targeted Design Platforms for accelerating systems development and integration with its 28nm 7 series Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Xilinx's Targeted Design Platform comes with boards, ISE Design Suite tools, IP cores, reference designs and FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) support- all for the sake of speed.

"Xilinx's 7 series families take FPGA technology further into SoC applications that were never possible before without costly and time-consuming ASIC or ASSP development," said Vin Ratford, Senior Vice President, World Wide Marketing, Xilinx. "Xilinx is executing a record-breaking rollout of its 28nm generation, which means customers now have access to base and domain platforms as well as a range of ecosystem offerings for evaluating, developing and deploying systems that take advantage of the low-power and flexibility 7 series FPGAs bring to the table."

Xilinx has commenced the roll out of its Kintex-325T, Virtex-485T, Virtex-2000T FPGAs and Zynq-7020 Extensible Processing Platform. The three new kits are the first among nearly 40 to be delivered by Xilinx and/or ecosystem members supporting embedded and high-speed connectivity applications, as well as markets such as automotive, broadcast, consumer, industrial and communications. Reference designs that come with each kit target both new and experienced FPGA users.


Kit details:
The Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 Evaluation Kit provides a flexible framework for designing higher-level systems using DDR3, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express, and other serial connectivity standards. An AMS header lets designers explore the AMS technology and see how the feature can trim BOM cost. Other communications features-high-speed GTX transceivers, SFP+, and SMA connectors-further extend the list of advanced capabilities that can be evaluated and leveraged from this platform. ($1,695 order entry open now)


The Kintex-7 FPGA DSP Kit co-developed with Avnet Electronic Marketing features the Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 board and includes an integrated high-speed analog FMC to interface to real-world signals. Featuring dual-channel 800 MSPS 16-bit digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and dual-channel 250 MSPS 14-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), the High-Speed Analog module delivers exceptional throughput when combined with the massively parallel processing bandwidth of the DSP48E1 arithmetic processing engines in the Kintex-7 FPGA. Data paths to and from the DSP slices can be created and integrated into systems using industry-standard AXI4 interface conventions. ($3,995 order entry now from Avnet)

The Virtex-7 FPGA VC707 Evaluation Kit gives designers an easy starting point for evaluating and leveraging devices of high performance and high bandwidth connectivity. ($3,495 with order entry open late-February 2012)