XILINX RANKS #1 IN FPGA EMBEDDED PROCESSING SOLUTIONS

The 2004 Embedded Market Study sponsored by CMP Media reflects a total of 2044 respondents and covers an exhaustive list of embedded processors. The Web-based questionnaire was developed jointly by CMP Media (Embedded Systems Programming, Electronic Engineering Times, Embedded Systems Conferences, Embedded Systems Europe, and Dr. Dobb's Journal) and Wilson Research Group. More information about the CMP survey is available by emailing Eric Berg at eberg@cmp.com.

"The acknowledgment and adoption of our soft and hard RISC cores is a testament to the vast array of applications in the embedded processing arena that we cover," said Rich Sevcik, executive vice president at Xilinx. "The combination of our familiar MicroBlaze and PicoBlaze cores, coupled with a complete development environment, has enabled our soft processor solutions to gain the leadership position in FPGA embedded processing."

Embedded Leadership
Competing with non-FPGA vendors, Xilinx placed in the top ten with its chip architectures ranking just behind Intel, Motorola and others. When polled on potential consideration over the next 12 months, Xilinx again placed first among FPGA vendors and in the top ten of all chip architecture vendors with over one third of the respondents considering Xilinx solutions.

In the FPGA hard processing category, Xilinx offers the 32-bit PowerPC CPU immersed in the Virtex-II Pro FPGAs. For embedded FPGA designs, respondents that have used the hard PowerPC core in the last 12 months came in at 24.7 percent. When asked whether considering use of the hard PowerPC in the next 12 months, the response doubled with 49.8 percent indicating that they would consider using PowerPC in their FPGA design.

For 32-bit soft processing requirements, almost 4 percent of the respondents indicated that they have purchased or used the Xilinx MicroBlaze core in the last 12 months. When polled on potential consideration over the next 12 months, considered use almost triples to about 10 percent.

For the 8-bit category, 2.7 percent of the respondents identified the PicoBlaze core as being used over the last 12 months with over 10 percent considering it in the next 12 months.

Xilinx Complete Processor Solution Offering
The Xilinx range of processor solutions and silicon enables embedded system designers to select the optimum performance and price points for their embedded processing needs. Offering the highest processor performance in any FPGA device, the industry standard PowerPC 32-bit core is immersed (hard) in the Virtex-II Pro family of FPGAs. The Xilinx MicroBlaze 32-bit soft core is a configurable, general-purpose RISC processor that can be used with both the Spartan and Virtex family of FPGAs depending on cost and performance requirements. Targeting the most cost-effective applications is the Xilinx PicoBlaze 8-bit microcontroller that can be used with the FPGA family as well as with Xilinx CoolRunner CPLDs.

To rapidly configure embedded processor solutions, Xilinx provides a common, fully integrated hardware and software development environment with the Platform Studio IDE. The Platform Studio environment enables both hardware and software designers to develop platforms targeting PowerPC hard processors or Xilinx MicroBlaze soft processor cores using a single design environment. The common design environment, bus structure and peripherals allow designers to easily select the best processor and peripherals for their application needs without extensive engineering rework or additional learning curve. The complete system environment provides an extensive library of peripherals (intellectual property cores), reference designs, development boards, internal and third party tools, and the most widely used operating systems.

Source: Xilinx