Date: 06/09/2012

Xilinx offering FPGA and ARM Cortex A9 combined chip enhanced to operate at 1GHz

The Zynq-7000 SoC from Xilinx is specifically designed for applications where they can use both hard ARM Cortex A9 processor and associated interface and the FPGA fabric on a single chip. This chip is becoming popular for applications where they need both standard embedded sub-system as well as programmable logic. Xilinx has increased the peak processing performance of this Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC family to 1 GHz. The speed enhancement is to help high-end image and graphic processing applications within the medical, Aerospace and Defense (A&D) markets, as well as computationally intensive systems targeting wired and wireless equipment.

Zynq-7045 packs ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore operating at 1 GHz maximum frequency and FPGA equivalent of more than 5 million ASIC gates (350k logic cells), and sixteen 12.5 Gb/s serial transceivers and 1334 GMACS of peak DSP performance. The Zynq-7045 provides a hard PCIe Gen2 x8 block, (PCIe x8 Gen3 can be implemented using a soft core in the programmable logic), with high performance 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, supporting programmable system integration for more 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.

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.