page_title: Xilinx
section_title: Technology
hierarchical_section_title: Xilinx / Technology
caption_attribution_description: The Spartan-3 platform was the industry’s first 90nm FPGA, delivering more functionality and bandwidth per dollar than was previously possible, setting new standards in the programmable logic industry. The Spartan-3E platform builds on the success of the earlier Spartan-3 platform by adding new features that improve system performance and reduce the cost of configuration. Because of their exceptionally low cost, Spartan-3 generation FPGAs are ideally suited to a wide range of consumer electronics applications, including broadband access, home networking, display/projection, and digital television equipment.
context_page_description: Xilinx, Inc. is an American technology company that develops highly flexible and adaptive processing platforms. The company invented the field-programmable gate array, programmable system-on-chips, and the adaptive compute acceleration platform. It is the semiconductor company that created the first fabless manufacturing model. Xilinx’s products are used across many industries and technologies, including the data center, wired & wireless communications, AI/ML, automotive, industrial, consumer, aerospace and defense and Broadcast & Pro-AV.
  Co-founded by Ross Freeman, Bernard Vonderschmitt, and James V Barnett II in 1984, the company went public on the NASDAQ in 1989.
context_section_description: Xilinx designs, develops and markets programmable logic products, including integrated circuits (ICs), software design tools, predefined system functions delivered as intellectual property (IP) cores, design services, customer training, field engineering and technical support. Xilinx sells both FPGAs and CPLDs for electronic equipment manufacturers in end markets such as communications, industrial, consumer, automotive and data processing.
  Xilinx's FPGAs have been used for the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) at the CERN European laboratory on the French-Swiss border to map and disentangle the trajectories of thousands of subatomic particles. Xilinx has also engaged in a partnership with the United States Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate to develop FPGAs to withstand the damaging effects of radiation in space, which are 1,000 times less sensitive to space radiation than the commercial equivalent, for deployment in new satellites. Xilinx FPGAs can run a regular embedded OS (such as Linux or vxWorks) and can implement processor peripherals in programmable logic. The Virtex-II Pro, Virtex-4, Virtex-5, and Virtex-6 FPGA families, which include up to two embedded IBM PowerPC cores, are targeted to the needs of system-on-chip (SoC) designers.
  Xilinx's IP cores include IP for simple functions (BCD encoders, counters, etc.), for domain specific cores (digital signal processing, FFT and FIR cores) to complex systems (multi-gigabit networking cores, the MicroBlaze soft microprocessor and the compact Picoblaze microcontroller). Xilinx also creates custom cores for a fee.
  The main design toolkit Xilinx provides engineers is the Vivado Design Suite, an integrated design environment (IDE) with a system-to-IC level tools built on a shared scalable data model and a common debug environment. Vivado includes electronic system level (ESL) design tools for synthesizing and verifying C-based algorithmic IP; standards based packaging of both algorithmic and RTL IP for reuse; standards based IP stitching and systems integration of all types of system building blocks; and the verification of blocks and systems. A free version WebPACK Edition of Vivado provides designers with a limited version of the design environment.
  Xilinx's Embedded Developer's Kit (EDK) supports the embedded PowerPC 405 and 440 cores (in Virtex-II Pro and some Virtex-4 and -5 chips) and the Microblaze core. Xilinx's System Generator for DSP implements DSP designs on Xilinx FPGAs. A freeware version of its EDA software called ISE WebPACK is used with some of its non-high-performance chips. Xilinx is the only (as of 2007) FPGA vendor to distribute a native Linux freeware synthesis toolchain.
  Xilinx announced the architecture for a new ARM Cortex-A9-based platform for embedded systems designers, that combines the software programmability of an embedded processor with the hardware flexibility of an FPGA. The new architecture abstracts much of the hardware burden away from the embedded software developers' point of view, giving them an unprecedented level of control in the development process. With this platform, software developers can leverage their existing system code based on ARM technology and utilize vast 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. In early 2011, Xilinx began shipping a new device family based on this architecture.  The Zynq-7000 SoC platform immerses ARM multi-cores, programmable logic fabric, DSP data paths, memories and I/O functions in a dense and configurable mesh of interconnect. The platform targets embedded designers working on market applications that require multi-functionality and real-time responsiveness, such as automotive driver assistance, intelligent video surveillance, industr
caption: The Spartan-3 platform was the industry's first 90nm FPGA, delivering more functionality and bandwidth per dollar than was previously possible.
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