Date: 04/07/2012

Reference design kit for designing high-speed comm-sys using 28nm FPGA

To speed up the development high speed large bandwidth communication systems using Xilinx new Kintex 28nm FPGAs, Xilinx has launched a new design kit. The new kit has fully validated and supported reference design that integrates an entire PCIe solution with DDR3 sub-system, including both the HDL and the complete software stack.

“The Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit helps increase our customers’ productivity by offering a Targeted Reference Design that removes much of the tedious work customers would otherwise have to do on their own. They can focus on what they do best – building and optimizing their own applications,” said Raj Seelam, director of marketing at Xilinx. “This highly optimized reference design can be used in production systems or as a proven base for custom modifications which significantly improves our customers’ time-to-market.”

The Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit includes a 20 Gb/s Targeted Reference Design (TRD) to jump-start application development. The reference design integrates the Kintex-7 device’s 12.5 Gb/s GTX transceivers and PCIe x8 Gen2 hard block with 10G DMA IP core from Northwest Logic, dual 10G Ethernet links using 10GBASE-R PHY interface, a virtual FIFO memory controller interfacing to an external DDR3 memory and supports the AMBA AXI4 (Advanced eXtensible Interface 4) standard.

The reference design is suitable for high bandwidth applications such as wired telecommunications and wireless infrastructure, audio, video, and broadcast solutions; high-end consumer markets; aerospace and defense (A&D) and high-performance computing storage applications.

The kit itself includes a Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 base board with a high-speed FMC daughter card from Faster Technology that allows up to four 10 Gb/s SFP+ interfaces, two of which are leveraged in the TRD to give developers a real-world example to reference for their next high-speed serial I/O designs. Also provided with the kit are the software drivers, driver source code and a GUI.

Kintex-7 FPGAs offer high-density logic and up to 32 GTX high-performance transceivers with a maximum performance up to 12.5 Gb/s and a peak serial bandwidth of 800 Gb/s.

Availability: The Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit is available now for $2895.
For more information on the Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit, visit www.xilinx.com/k7connkit.com