Xilinx Zynq EPPs: Leibson's Law in action?

By _Leibson's Law

March 3, 2011

Back in 2001, Xilinx introduced the Virtex-II Pro FPGAs based on 130nm process technology. These FPGAs were the first from Xilinx to incorporate a hardened processor core. (Back then, it was a PowerPC core.) Fast forward 10 years. After telegraphing its punch at ESC last spring, Xilinx has just introduced the first four members of its EPP product line named Zynq. “What’s an EPP?” you might ask. It’s an “Extensible Processing Platform,” a new IC category Xilinx hopes to create. Think of an EPP as an embedded processor complex with an attached FPGA fabric. That’s a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA turned on its head so that the hardened processor complex is the focus of the device and the attached FPGA array is the accelerant. Oh yes, and the 300MHz PowerPC has been replaced with two ARM Cortex-A9 cores running at 800MHz each.

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