| FPGA dev kit supports hard, soft PowerPC cores |
Sep. 12, 2005
 Xilinx is shipping a "comprehensive design environment" for one of its newest FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) targeting telecom/datacom, medical, and mil/aero applications. The PowerPC and MicroBlaze Development Kit Virtex-4 FX12 Edition includes a development board, Linux-hosted design tools, intellectual property (IP), and hardware/software reference designs including a Linux "demonstration."
(Click for larger view of ML403 development board)
Xilinx began shipping the FX12 in January, describing it as a fifth-generation Virtex-4 chip built on 90-nanometer process technology. At that time, the FX12 was available with a 32-bit embedded PowerPC processor clockable up to 450 MHz. The new development kit supports both hard PPC or soft MicroBlaze cores.
The ML403 development board for the FX12 includes a 100 MHz clock oscillator, and two clock sockets. It has 64MB of DDR SDRAM, 64MB of Flash, 4KB of IIC EEPROM, and 8MB of ZBT (zero bus turnaround) SRAM -- Xilinx describes ZBT as a kind of synchronous SRAM architecture optimized for networking and telecommunications applications.
The ML403 includes an on-board 16 x 2 character LCD, along with four SMA connectors with differential clocks, for attachment to fiber optic networks. It also includes standard PC I/O, including:- Two PS/2 connectors
- Audio I/O
- RS-232
- Three USB ports (2 device, 1 host)
- PC4 JTAG
- DB 15 VGA display
- 10/100/1000 RJ-45 port
- 64-bit user expansion connector
- GPIO
- Buttons and LEDs
In addition to the development board, the kit include:- Xilinx's Platform Studio embedded tool suite and Integrated Software Environment (ISE) FPGA design software
- Claimed peripheral support with more than 60 IP cores
- JTAG probe (choice of USB or parallel) for code download, debug and FPGA programming
- Serial and Ethernet cables, regional power supply, pre-configuredFlash device
- Verified hardware and software reference designs to exercise features of the ML403 platform
- MontaVista Linux demonstration
- Wind River VxWorks demonstration
- Documentation
Xilinx says the complete package allows developers to choose the most effective processor core for their application, customize IP, optimize performance, and validate software in advance of receiving custom hardware.
Availability
The PowerPC and MicroBlaze Development Kit, Virtex-4 FX12 Edition (DO- ML403-EDK-ISE), is available now, priced at $895. The included tools support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 (RHEL 3.0), as well as Windows 2000 SP2/3/4, XP SP2/3, and Solaris 2.8/5.8 and 2.9/5.9.
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