Xilinx Ships Domain-Optimized FPGAs for Communication, DSP, Embedded Processing Applications
October 2, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS
Xilinx Inc. began shipping the Virtex-5 SX240T and FX200T devices and announced the new Virtex-5 TXT field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform for developers of broadcast video, medical imaging, wireless communication, defense and high-performance computing applications.
All built on the Virtex-5 FPGA architecture, these devices provide a reconfigurable digital signal processing (DSP) platform, an FPGA device with dual embedded PowerPC processors and high bandwidth serial connectivity.
"Xilinx has steadily come up with the leading-edge FPGA technologies and ecosystem of IP [intellectual property], tools and support services that can make the difference between realizing a promise and a product," said Mario LeCavalier, senior design engineer at Ross Video Ltd.
"They have done it again remarkably well with the feature-to-cost ratio of Virtex-5 devices. The embedded gigabit serial IO [input/output] allowed us to integrate expensive SD/HD [secure digital/high-definition] video serializer and deserializer chips inside the FPGA with our new MDK [multidefinition keyer] system.
"Plus, the high count of available hardware multipliers is a blessing for digital video processing," he said.
The SX240T device offers up to 528 Giga multiply-accumulate operations per second (GMACs) of multiply-and-accumulate performance and more than 190 Giga (billion) floating point operations per second (GFLOPS) of single-precision, floating-point DSP.
The FX200T device delivers a total of 1,900 Dhrystone million instructions per second (DMIPS) with its two embedded PowerPC 440 processor blocks.
With 24 integrated 6.5 Gbps serial transceivers, the FX200T device is the largest member of the Virtex-5 FXT FPGA platform optimized for embedded processing, Xilinx said.
These devices complement the new Virtex-5 TXT devices. Optimized for 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), 100 GbE and other high-bandwidth communication protocol bridging application, the Virtex-5 TXT FPGA platform provides the highest number of serial transceivers at 6.5 Gbps to provide more than 600 Gbps total bandwidth, according to the company. It will begin shipping by the end of this year.
Consuming between 35% and 40% less dynamic power than the previous 90 nm family, Virtex-5 FPGAs offer developers innovations in transceiver technology, DSP and embedded processor performance so customers can meet their next-generation system design challenges, Xilinx said.
Engineering samples of the Virtex-5 SX240T and FX200T devices are available for purchase through Xilinx distributors. The new Virtex-5 TX150T and Virtex-5 TX240T devices will begin sampling by the end of calendar 2008 with production devices available in 1Q 2009.
Source: Xilinx Inc.