Out of the box FPGA kits
25 September 2009
Back at the beginning of the year Xilinx launched two major families of FPGAs – the Virtex-6 and Spartan-6. These FPGAs were claimed to reduce system costs of 50% and power consumption by 65% compared to previous families.
These devices are now backed up by a set of tools under the Xilinx Base Targeted Design Platform, that are aimed at accelerating the development of system-on-chip (SoC) solutions with the new FPGAs.
This base-level targeted design platform combines the 11.2 release of the ISE Design Suite, expanded intellectual property (IP) portfolio, and pre-verified reference designs targeting Virtex-6 or Spartan-6 FPGAs within fully integrated evaluation kits that enable design teams to dramatically shorten development cycles and focus engineering resources on creating greater product differentiation.
The new Virtex-6 FPGA and Spartan-6 FPGA Evaluation Kits are the first in a series of kits Xilinx will offer throughout the year designed to simplify the evaluation and development of SoCs with the latest generation of programmable technologies from Xilinx. These kits provide all the elements needed to design right out of the box, so both new and experienced FPGA users can achieve the best performance, lowest power, highest bandwidth, and most feature-rich utilisation.
The Xilinx Base Targeted Design Platform, or base platform, is tuned to the needs of logic and connectivity designers with evaluation kits that contain the basic building blocks common in virtually all system designs to address a broad set of markets and applications. By utilising these key system functions that have been pre-validated to work together in the base platform, designers are able to cut development time by as much as half compared to traditional design methodologies. Reference designs then guide designers on best practices for integrating custom elements into the base design and implementing advanced features, such as DDR2 and DDR3 memory interfaces, high-speed serial I/O, and on-chip clocking resources. Board schematics and layout files further streamline the design process.
“The Xilinx base platform is a complete FPGA development environment that reflects the way traditional hardware designers work. It gives them immediate access to the new Spartan-6 or Virtex-6 FPGA families, tools, IP, and development boards combined in a way that lets them work smarter,” said Vin Ratford, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development at Xilinx. “Designers can leverage common IP and reference designs to shorten design time and realize productivity gains that greatly exceed conventional a la carte offerings. By spending less time on developing the infrastructure of an application, designers can spend more time adding value through innovation for their next-generation systems.”
The new 11.2 version of the ISE Design Suite supports both Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGA families and is designed to work with the latest software from Cadence Design Systems, Inc., Mentor Graphics Corporation, and Synopsys, Inc. The ISE Design Suite 11.2 Editions enable logic, DSP, embedded hardware/software designers and system integrators to take advantage of the new features and capabilities of Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGAs with optimised design environments aligned to the Xilinx Base Targeted Design Platform, as well as to future domain-specific platforms.
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