FPGAs claim ultimate level of integration

Devices incorporate embedded PowerPC 440 processor blocks, high-speed RocketIO GTX transceivers and dedicated XtremeDSP processing capabilities.

Available now from Xilinx, the Virtex-5 FXT series are the industry's first FPGAs with embedded PowerPC 440 processor blocks, high-speed RocketIO GTX transceivers and dedicated XtremeDSP processing capabilities.

Comprising the fourth platform in the 65nm Virtex-5 family, Virtex-5 FXT devices deliver high performance and help designers to reduce system costs, board space and component count.

With support from Xilinx and industry-leading providers of logic, embedded and DSP development tools and IP cores, Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs deliver the ultimate system integration platform for applications in: wired and wireless communications, audio/video broadcast equipment, military, aerospace, industrial systems and many others.

"The integration of major processing and serdes components on a single device will be of significant value to designers who need to conserve board space and costs, while meeting stringent requirements for high performance", says analyst Will Strauss, President and Founder of Forward Concepts.

"In wireless, for example, the kind of basestations a technology like the Virtex-5 FXT platform can enable is enviable, especially in the area of LTE (Long-Term Evolution) basebands in support of 4G communications systems".

Xilinx has now completed the introduction of the four domain-optimised Virtex-5 FPGA platforms that comprise the Virtex-5 family.

The Virtex-5 family - the first FPGA family to deliver the performance, density and cost benefits of 65nm process technologies - offers unprecedented performance and density gains with speeds on average 30% faster and a logic capacity 65% greater than previous 90nm generation FPGAs.

Xilinx achieved this breakthrough performance while at the same time reducing dynamic power consumption by 35% relative to the previous generation devices.

The four domain-optimised platforms - LX, LXT, SXT and FXT - offer a wide range of devices that enable engineers to cost-effectively implement electronics systems by selecting an FPGA that incorporates the optimal mix of resources for their particular design: logic, I/O and hardened IP blocks for logic-intensive, embedded processing, DSP and serial connectivity applications.

The innovative Virtex-5 FXT platform offers the first FPGAs to provide up to two industry-standard PowerPC 440 processor blocks.

Each processor, with integrated 32Kbyte instruction and 32Kbyte data caches, delivers up to 1100DMIPS at 550MHz.

Tightly coupled to the PowerPC440 blocks is a new integrated 5x2 crossbar processor interconnect architecture that provides simultaneous access to I/O and memory.

Highly integrated, this innovative interconnect architecture includes dedicated master and slave processor local bus interfaces, four DMA ports with separate transmit and receive channels, and a dedicated memory bus interface enabling high-performance low-latency point-to-point connectivity.

Designers can rapidly and easily implement advanced scalable embedded processing applications using the PowerPC 440 embedded processor blocks.

The advanced PLB architecture maximises data transfers between the processor, crossbar and soft IP logic with high-throughput 128bit interfaces to help minimise system bottlenecks.

Also, the enhanced high-performance auxiliary processor control unit (APU) provides added connectivity for dedicated co-processing engines or custom user defined instructions in applications such as video processing, 3D data processing and floating-point maths.

With the release of EDK 10.1, the PowerPC440 block in Virtex-5 FXT is supported by industry standard operating systems including Wind River Systems, Green Hills, and other key embedded OS providers.

Linux support is provided through MontaVista, Wind River Systems with others soon to be added.

In addition, Xilinx is actively engauged in the open source Linux community.

To address the growing demand for higher I/O bandwidth, the Virtex-5 FXT platform includes high-performance, low-power RocketIO GTX transceivers capable of supporting datarates from 500Mbit/s to 6.5Gbit/s.

Customers can design applications supporting standards such as XAUI, Fibre Channel, Sonet, Serial RapidIO, PCI Express 1.1 and 2.0, Interlaken, and others.

Consuming less than 200mW typical power per channel at 6.5Gbit/s, the GTX transceivers come with many advanced features such as four-tap DFE receiver equalisation in addition to linear equalisation and transmit pre-emphasis to improve signal integrity at higher line rates.

The new transceiver blocks also include a unique multi-code physical coding sublayer to support both 64B/66B and 64B/67B encoding/decoding schemes saving thousands of logic cells for each channel.

In addition, cross-platform pin compatibility enables customers who have designs targeting Virtex-5 LXT and SXT devices to migrate their designs to Virtex-5 FXT devices in order to take advantage of the higher-performance embedded processing and serial connectivity.

The Virtex-5 FXT platform includes up to 384 DSP slices and 16.5Mbit of internal memory that can be configured to provide over 190GMACs of DSP processing performance and 92Tbit/s of memory bandwidth respectively at 500MHz.

This balance of hardware resources maximises the performance for computation-intensive applications typical of DSP and video applications.

The DSP48E slice, available in all XtremeDSP Virtex-5 devices, enables higher levels of DSP integration and lower power consumption than previous-generation Virtex devices.

Over 40 dynamically controlled operating modes are supported including: multiplier, multiplier-accumulator, multipler-adder/subtractor, tree input adder, barrel shifter, wide counters and comparators.

"To meet both the market and bandwidth requirements of transporting voice, video and data, today's system on chip solutions must combine flexibility with very high-performance embedded processing, digital signal processing and connectivity capabilities", says Steve Douglass, Vice President of Product Development for the Xilinx Advanced Product Group.

"The Virtex-5 FXT platform ties the high-performance logic and DSP processing capabilities of the Virtex-5 family with industry standard PowerPC 440 processor blocks for high-performance processing and high-speed transceivers that can move data on and off chip fast".

The Virtex-5 FXT FPGA platform is supported by the new ISE Design Suite 10.1 development tools from Xilinx.

This recently announced unified development offering includes access to all the domain specific tools to streamline complete system designs for logic, embedded and DSP applications.

This includes ISE Foundation, Embedded Development Kit (EDK), System Generator for DSP, AccelDSP synthesis tool, ChipScope Pro and ChipScope Pro serial I/O Toolkit, PlanAhead design and analysis tool and ISE simulator.

In addition to simplified installation and registration processes, ISE Design Suite 10.1 introduces inter-tool integration improvements and makes all products, purchased or not, available for evaluation.

Virtex-5 FXT FPGA samples are now shipping for the FX30T and FX70T devices.

The remaining FX100T, FX130T and FX200T devices will be available over the next six months with the first production devices scheduled to be made available in the third quarter of 2008.

The FX30T device will list for US $159 in 1000-unit volumes by the second half of 2009.

The Virtex-5 EasyPath programme supports Virtex-5 FXT devices for high-volume cost reductions.

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