Xilinx, Inc. has launched its first Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP), which the company touts as a major milestone in the roll-out of a complete embedded processing platform that for the first time offers developers ASIC levels of performance and power consumption, the flexibility of an FPGA and the programmability of a microprocessor. Customers who have developed systems using the Zynq-7000 EPP emulation platform, early access Xilinx hardware tools, and standard software tools supported by the ARM Connected Community are now migrating their applications to these first devices and beginning the next stages of their product development.  

For systems that need to support applications requiring high, real-time performance, the Zynq-7000 EPP delivers levels of performance that go beyond what traditional processing solutions can implement, according to Zilinx. Emulation platforms, hardware development tools, Open Source Linux support, and the recently announced Extensible Virtual Platform developed jointly with Cadence Design Systems, Inc. all help to make developing and implementing Zynq-7000 EPP systems possible. A growing list of OS support is adding to an expanding ecosystem offering embedded tool and software development solutions. 

The Zynq-7000 family combines an industry-standard ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore processing system with Xilinx’s scalable 28nm programmable logic architecture. It supports parallel development of software for the dual-core Cortex-A9 processor-based system and custom accelerators and peripherals in the programmable logic. Software developers can leverage the open source Eclipse platform, Xilinx Platform Studio Software Development Kit (SDK), ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5) and ARM RealView Development Suite (RVDS), or compilers, debuggers, and applications from leading vendors within the ARM Connected Community and Xilinx Alliance Program ecosystems. Customers can go to vendors such as Enea Services Linköping AB, Express Logic, Inc., Lauterbach Datentechnik GmbH, The MathWorks,  PetaLogix, Mentor Graphics Corp.,  Micrium, and Wind River Systems for their development solutions.


Developers can tailor the Zynq-7000 family’s programmable logic to maximize system level performance and efficiently address application specific requirements. Xilinx’s ISE Design Suite provides a comprehensive hardware development environment that includes development tools and AMBA 4 Advanced Extensible Interface (AXI) bus protocol-compliant Plug-and-Play intellectual property (IP) cores as well as Bus Functional Models (BFM) to accelerate design and verification.

To meet new customer requirements in high-end applications targeting Wired, Wireless and Video Broadcast markets, Xilinx is also announcing the replacement of the Zynq-7040 device with the new Zynq-7045 device to extend the family’s range of twelve, 12.5 Gbps transceiver technology to sixteen. This will enable further bridging applications and wider connections to high speed DAC/ADCs. The increased programmable logic capacity (DSP, BRAM and Logic) will offer designers greater signal processing capability for functions such as filtering, digital conversions, and more, as well as greater opportunities for customizing specific functions. The Zynq-7045 device becomes the new high end of the Zynq-7000 family that spans from 30k logic cells to target the most cost sensitive industrial, automotive and consumer applications, all the way up to 350k logic cells for the applications requiring the highest capacity and performance in a single scalable platform. 

Detailed documentation and videos can be found here.

Availability
Zynq-7020 EPP initial samples are shipping now to participants of the Early Access program, with production qualified parts on track to begin shipping in the second half of 2012.