Xilinx hardwires Cortex-A9 MPCore processor into FPGA

Richard Wilson
Tuesday 27 April 2010 22:01

Xilinx has introduced its first FPGA design platform with an embedded ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor.

Xilinx has worked with ARM for over a year to allow the programmable logic elements of the FPGA, with their highly parallel architecture, to be closely coupled with the processor system through the AMBA-AXI on-chip bus.

According to the FPGA supplier, this architectural approach “addresses common performance bottlenecks between these parallel and serial computing environments, memory and I/O.”

“It also gives the processor system configuration control of the programmable logic, including dynamic reconfiguration,” said Xilinx.

“By creating an architecture within a familiar ARM processor-based development framework, this new Extensible Processing Platform can be the engine of innovation for many design teams held back today by performance bottlenecks,” said Vin Ratford, Xilinx senior v-p for worldwide marketing and business development.

The processor subsystem is based around ARM’s dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore processors, each running at up to 800MHz.

The aim has been to offer within the FPGA a full processor system including caches, memory controllers and commonly used connectivity and I/O peripherals.

Efforts have also been made to support different operating systems such as Linux, Wind River’s VxWorks and Micrium’s uC-OSII.

The aim is to allow developers to tap into off-the-shelf open-source and commercially available software component libraries.

“Because the system boots an OS at reset, software development can get under way quickly within familiar development and debug environments using tools such as ARM’s RealView development suite and related third-party tools, Eclipse-based IDEs, GNU, the Xilinx Software Development Kit and others,” said Xilinx.

The AMBA-AXI bus protocol has been redesigned to make it compatible with highly parallel embedded FPGA design. It adds support for longer bursts which will support devices with large block transfers.

There is also quality of service (QoS) signalling to manage latency and bandwidth in complex multi-master systems.

“This will take embedded system design to performance and efficiency levels considered the exclusive domain of desktop, laptop and network equipment,” said Keith Clarke, v-p and general manager of fabric IP processor division at ARM.

The first FPGAs based on what the company is calling the Extensible Processing Platform will be available next year.

See: Xilinx brings ARM Cortex and AMBA to its FPGAs

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