Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA User Guide Lite

By Peter Alfke, Xilinx Inc.    
pldesignline.com (July 22, 2009)

What is the purpose of this paper?
This paper gives potential users an easy-to-grasp idea of the device functions of Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGAs. It describes the functionality of these devices in far more detail than in the data sheet—but avoids the minute implementation details covered in the various Virtex-6 FPGA user guides.

In traditional product documentation, a data sheet provides concentrated information about the whole family, without describing the capabilities in great detail. On the other hand, user guides give all the details that the designer needs, but — at more than a thousand pages — they may require weeks of work to read and understand all the details.

This paper describes the capabilities (what you can do) in detail but leaves out the implementation details (how to utilize the capabilities). The idea is to give the designer enough information to evaluate the capabilities, without requiring weeks of study. This paper should create significant enthusiasm in many designers, who before did not have the patience or the motivation to study entire user guides.

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