June 28, 2012 -- Xilinx Inc. today announced the availability of the Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit for designers creating advanced serial I/O designs across a broad range of high-bandwidth applications. The Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit increases designer productivity by including a fully validated and supported reference design that integrates an entire PCIe solution with DDR3 sub-system, including both the HDL and the complete software stack.

The Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit provides a comprehensive, out-of-the box design environment that includes a 20-Gbps Targeted Reference Design (TRD) to jump-start application development. The reference design integrates the Kintex-7 device's 12.5-Gbps GTX transceivers and PCIe x8 Gen2 hard block with a high-performance 10G DMA IP core from Northwest Logic, dual 10G Ethernet links using 10GBASE-R PHY interface, a virtual FIFO memory controller interfacing to an external DDR3 memory and supports the AMBA AXI4 (Advanced eXtensible Interface 4) standard.

The reference design provides designers with a high-performance solution for high-bandwidth applications such as wired telecommunications and wireless infrastructure, audio, video, and broadcast solutions; high-end consumer markets; aerospace and defense, and high-performance computing-storage applications. Also provided are the software drivers, driver source code and a GUI to enable users to control and evaluate the design more quickly.

The kit itself includes a Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 base board with a high-speed FMC daughter card from Faster Technology that allows up to four 10 Gbps SFP+ interfaces, two of which are leveraged in the TRD to give developers a real-world example to reference for their next high-speed serial I/O designs.

The 28-nm Kintex-7 family is designed for maximum power efficiency and delivers a 2X price-performance improvement while consuming 50% less power compared to the previous generation of FPGAs. Kintex-7 FPGAs offer high-density logic and up to 32 GTX high-performance transceivers with a maximum performance up to 12.5Gbps and a peak serial bandwidth of 800Gbps.

Availability

The Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity Kit is available now for $2895.

Posted by: John Miklosz