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Xilinx rationalises and advances development-board support

Earlier in 2009, Xilinx announced its intention to support its Virtex and Spartan FPGA product lines with design-tool suites tailored to particular application domains. Since then, the company says, it has been introducing some individual elements of its new approach; now, it has added the Base Targeted Design Platform, blending the version 11.2 release of its ISE design tool suite, an expanded IP (intellectual-property) portfolio and verified reference designs for Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGAs. One of the objectives of this programme is to rationalise Xilinx’ offering of evaluation and development kits and boards; in the future, a smaller number of base-level design platforms will host individual daughter boards that will be designed around particular FPGAs and around application areas. Base platforms address the needs of logic- and connectivity- focussed designers; additions will concentrate on areas such as embeddedsystem design and DSP applications.

Previously, Xilinx says, its reference designs did not present users with a systemlevel view; now, graphical user interfaces offer that level of interaction. If you are working in image processing, for example, Xilinx says that you can quickly re-confi gure the FPGA to explore logic-based versus DSP-based algorithms using a multi-boot arrangement with different confi gurations held ready in flash memory ; in effect, this approach offers the user the facility of experimenting with dynamic and partial re-confi guration in a prepackaged form. Referencedesign examples come with full source code.

This release includes the Virtex-6 FPGA ML605 evaluation kit, a scalable development environment for the Virtex-6 LX240T FPGA targeted at wired telecommunications, wireless infrastructure, broadcast and other highperformance applications. The kit supports system-level capabilities that include high-speed serial transceivers, PCIe Gen2 endpoints, DDR3 memory control, Gigabit Ethernet, and DVI; the kit costs $1995. For the lower cost FPGA series, the Spartan-6 FPGA SP601 evaluation kit is a $295, entry-level environment for the development of consumer, infotainment, video and other cost- and power-sensitive applications that use the Spartan-6 LX16 FPGA. System-design capabilities include DDR2 memory control, fl ash, Ethernet, general- purpose I/O and UART.

Xilinx, www.xilinx.com.