The worldwide market for industrial infrastructure and wireline networking products exceeded 5 million nodes in 2008 and is projected to grow over 10% annually. Xilinx has released two “Targeted Design Platforms” aiming to simplify development of real-time Ethernet networks for industrial automation applications and for high definition digital video conferencing, surveillance, and machine vision.
Both kits use a low cost Spartan-6 LX150T and include an Avnet designed development board with two FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) daughter cards, video and image processing soft IP, ISE Design Suite System Edition software, and four targeted reference designs. The LX150T has 12 to 36 6.5 Gbit/s transceivers, 288 to 864 DSP slices, and up to 25.9 1-Mbit memory blocks.
The Industrial Networking Kit has Dual Port 10/100 Ethernet (IEEE1588 Capable PHY) interfaces
dual CAN PHY Interfaces and RS-232, RS-485, and available 32-bit MicroBlaze soft processor.
The Industrial Video Processing Kit includes Targeted Reference Designs that can be used out of the box to create single-chip camera and video processing modules that support live HD camera, dual camera, and DVI input sources. It also features the Omnivision image sensor which provides direct support for real-time high-definition video streaming.
The FPGA Industrial Ethernet Kit costs $1,895 and the Industrial Video Processing Kit costs $2,695.
Of course, other manufactures have full reference designs and development kits. Altera offers 18 design kits for their Cyclone III devices, not all of which can reliably handle Fast Ethernet. But the chips themselves have up to eight transceivers with CDR, supporting data rates from 600 Mbps to 3.125 Gbits/s. The LatticeECP3 family offers multi-protocol 3.2G SERDES with XAUI jitter compliance, DDR3 memory interfaces, powerful DSP capabilities, and memory and up to 149K LU. Actel’s SmartFusion line suppots 10/100 Ethernet with a MAC and an external PHY.
– Jim Harrison
Advertisement
Learn more about Xilinx
