New Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA-based Connectivity Kit

The folks at Xilinx have announced the availability of the Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit for customers creating advanced serial I/O designs across a broad range of high bandwidth applications.

The Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit dramatically increases designer productivity by including a fully validated and supported reference design that integrates an entire PCIe solution with DDR3 sub-system, including both the HDL and the complete software stack.

“The Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit helps increase our customers’ productivity by offering a Targeted Reference Design that removes much of the tedious work customers would otherwise have to do on their own. They can focus on what they do best – building and optimizing their own applications,” said Raj Seelam, director of marketing at Xilinx. “This highly optimized reference design can be used in production systems or as a proven base for custom modifications which significantly improves our customers’ time-to-market.”

The Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit provides a comprehensive, out-of-the box design environment that includes a 20 Gb/s Targeted Reference Design (TRD) to jump-start application development. The reference design integrates the Kintex-7 device’s 12.5 Gb/s GTX transceivers and PCIe x8 Gen2 hard block with a high-performance 10G DMA IP core from Northwest Logic, dual 10G Ethernet links using 10GBASE-R PHY interface, a virtual FIFO memory controller interfacing to an external DDR3 memory and supports the AMBA AXI4 (Advanced eXtensible Interface 4) standard.


The reference design provides designers with a high-performance solution for high bandwidth applications such as wired telecommunications and wireless infrastructure, audio, video, and broadcast solutions; high-end consumer markets; aerospace and defense (A&D) and high-performance computing storage applications. Also provided are the software drivers, driver source code and a GUI to enable users to control and evaluate the design more quickly.

The kit itself includes a Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 base board with a high-speed FMC daughter card from Faster Technology that allows up to four 10 Gb/s SFP+ interfaces, two of which are leveraged in the TRD to give developers a real-world example to reference for their next high-speed serial I/O designs.

The 28nm Kintex-7 family is designed for maximum power efficiency and delivers a 2x price-performance improvement while consuming 50 percent less power compared to the previous generation of FPGAs. Kintex-7 FPGAs offer high-density logic and up to 32 GTX high-performance transceivers with a maximum performance up to 12.5 Gb/s and a peak serial bandwidth of 800 Gb/s.

Availability
The Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit is available now for $2895. For more information on the Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit, visit www.xilinx.com/k7connkit.com

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