Xilinx: FPGA and ARM Cortex-A9 processors make great combination

Xilinx: FPGA and ARM Cortex-A9 processors make great combination

In December 2011, Xilinx started shipping samples of its Zynq-7000 family of ICs that combine an FPGA and dual 32-bit Cortex-A9 processors. The four versions of Zynq-7000 also have a NEON double precision floating point accelerator for each processor. The processor system can boot at power on, so SW development start right away. Xilinx is planning to ship production quantities in the first quarter.

The ICs have 28k to 359k FPGA logic cells that are tightly coupled to the CPUs via a multilayered ARM AMBA AXI interconnect. The interconnect is nonblocking and supports multiple simultaneous master-slave transactions. The devices also have 256 Kbytes of RAM; up to 900 DSP slices; external DDR3, DDR2, or LPDDR2 interfaces; two 10/100/1000 Ethernet MACs; two USB 2.0 ports; two CAN ports; and two 12-bit A/D converters. Digi-Key has a limited number of these wondrous devices in stock, with prices starting at $248 in single quantity. Xilinx says the high-volume price for the smallest Zynq-7000 will be as low as $15.

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