Date: 19/08/2012

Zynq-7000 enhanced to perform at 1 GHz

Xilinx, Inc. has increased the peak processing performance of its Zynq-7000 all programmable SoC family to 1 GHz, making the Zynq to meet the requirements of high-end image and graphic processing applications within the medical, Aerospace and Defense (A&D) markets and also for wired and wireless equipment.

“Using Zynq for our measurement devices gives us an extremely compact physical solution as well as an extremely compact system because software and hardware are closer together than ever before,” said Matthias Goetz, hardware project leader at Rohde & Schwarz. “We especially appreciate the great bandwidth performance between the FPGA and industry standard processing sub-system because it accelerates our processing and system development and it allows us to easily move functions from processor to programmable logic when and where needed.”

“The combination of the processor sub-system running at 1 GHz with the acceleration capability that the tightly coupled programmable logic offers, puts the Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC on par, and often ahead, of competing dual core solutions with higher processor frequencies, and in many cases at lower power,” said Vidya Rajagopalan, Xilinx’s vice president of processing solutions. “A significant factor behind our ability to take the Zynq-7000 family to 1 GHz is Xilinx’s choice of TSMC’s 28nm HPL process, which we are using for our entire 28nm generation to bring the value of low-power with high-performance to customers.”

“We are very excited to have received our first Zynq-7045 devices and impressed with Xilinx’s execution with the Zynq family. Having an integrated solution with processor and programmable logic in a single device provides significant advantages over our existing 2 chip design in terms of power reduction, size, and system performance,” said Mike Hodson, OmniTek president. “The added capability of operating the ARM processing system at 1 GHz provides us the headroom needed to run our video processing GUI while simultaneously running several audio codecs and other real time processing functions. The 12.5 GHz transceivers enable us to handle 8 SDI video streams while also supporting 10G Ethernet for video over IP,” said Roger Fawcett, OmniTek managing director.

“Key to accelerating our development effort was how quickly we were able to port our existing software to Zynq using Xilinx’s software development kit using the familiar industry standard, Eclipse IDE,” added Richard Davies, OmniTek software director.

Zynq-7045 packs ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore processor, FPGA block (5 million equivalent ASIC gates (350k logic cells)), sixteen 12.5 Gb/s serial transceivers, hard PCIe Gen2 x8 block, and SelectIO technology supporting up to 1866 Mb/s for additional DDR3 memory interfaces and 1.6 Gb/s for LVDS interfaces in DDR mode.

Xilinx has also announced the addition of the CLG225 package, a small, 13 x 13mm package for Zynq-7010 devices for space constrained applications, such as industrial motor control and imaging, camera-based driver assistance systems, portable medical imaging equipment and a variety of consumer products.

Availability: Zynq-7045 devices are currently shipping to select Early Access customers. Broader availability will begin next quarter. Zynq-7020 devices have been shipping to customers since December 2011.