Xilinx brings processor-FPGA combo to India

23rd July 2012
Xilinx brings  processor-FPGA combo to India
Xilinx executives Neeraj Varma and Navaneethan Sundaramoorthy, at the company's stand at the ESC event in Bangalore, July 19 2012. Inset: Zync 7000 family. Main Photo: IndiaTechOnline

From Anand Parthasarathy, reporting from ESC 2012, Bangalore July 23, 2012: Leading global provider of programmable platforms, Xilinx, used last week’s Embedded Systems Conference (ESC 2012) in Bangalore to unveil a new family of products which combines an ARM processor system with 28 nanometer programmable logic ( FPGAs) on the same monolithic slab of silicon. The Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP) gives system and software architects and developers a flexible platform to launch their new solutions and traditional ASIC and ASSP users an alternative that recognizes today’s programmable imperative.
The processor boots first, prior to configuration of the programmable logic. This saves time and effort and lets software developers and hardware designers start development simultaneously, explained Navaneethan Sundaramoorthy, Senior Embedded Systems Engineer at the San Jose ( California – US) headquarters of Xilinx and Neeraj Varma, Director Sales, for the company in India, in a special briefing for IndiaTechOnline, on the sidelines of the ESC event.

Demonstrations at the event, highlighted the strong video, graphics and real-time processing capabilities of Zynq-7000: Using Linux on a ZynQ-7000 development system the demo compared a software-based approach to processing medical CAT-scan images using dual Cortex-A9 cores, against a hardware-accelerated solution with critical functions performed in programmable logic showing an overall performance gain of over10x. 
Another demo used Windows Embedded Compact 7 as the operating environment to point at the strong multimedia capabilities of the Zync –based route. The Zync-7000 was also shown performing HD video processing using a single chip that was earlier unachievable evebn with twin chips.
Typical scenarios where the processor- FPGA combo had been successively deployed include in-car computers, video surveillance where the intelligence was built into the camera end; machine vision and – something that would appeal to India’s frugal innovators – a high speed rice sorting station.

Xilinx also harnessed the ESC event in Bangalore to launch its new design suite, Vivado, which is Internet-Protocol driven and promises a four-fold improvement over hitherto achievable system integration and implementation speeds.
For More information on Zync 7000: http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/epp/zynq-7000/index.htm  
For more on Vivado: http://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/index.htm