Xilinx ships first Zynq-7000 devices

“It’s exciting to see early access customers take what they’ve accomplished since we first launched the Extensible Processing Platform program in April 2010 and apply their systems to these first devices,” said Lawrence Getman, Vice President of Processing at Xilinx. “We are able to give them a significant time to market advantage in their development and introduction of new products that require the unrivaled levels of system performance, flexibility and integration offered by this new class of system-on-chip.” “Participating in the Early Access Program gave National Instruments the opportunity to jump start development to make it possible for NI LabVIEW system design software to program both the high performance processor and programmable fabric present in the Zynq-7000 EPP with a single development environment,” said Jamie Smith, Director of Embedded Systems Product Marketing at National Instruments. “Now that we've received the silicon, we'll continue our development toward providing control and monitoring systems to our customers leveraging the increased capabilities of the Zynq-7000 devices.” 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 within the ARM Connected Community and Xilinx Alliance Program ecosystems. “When we looked at the possibility of leveraging our processor based development investments across different product lines, the Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform’s combination of processor and programmable logic became a clear choice for several of our applications,” said Bernd Liebetrau, Head of CoC Digital Integration at Rohde & Schwarz. “The platform approach allows us to customize each device to meet our various application needs while at the same time enabling us to leverage the software developments over multiple products. Rohde & Schwarz has always been at the forefront of technology and being an early adopter and receiving early samples of the Zynq-7000 EPP is a significant milestone for us.” Developers can tailor the Zynq-7000 family’s programmable logic to maximize system level performance and efficiently address application specific requirements. Xilinx’s award-winning 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. “We’ve been heavily focused on the development of our Zynq-7000 EPP products and IP over the past several months,” says Michael Fawcett, CTO of iVeia, “So, naturally, we were very excited to receive our first Zynq-7020 devices. Our Atlas-I-Z7e will be the first computer-on-module to host a Zynq device and will drop into existing sockets for Android handheld, digital radio, and video processing applications. We fully expect to be able to demonstrate such applications within a few months, a credit to Xilinx’s early access support, tools, and emulation platform.” 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.