Jan 30 2009
Xilinx Automotive Vertex3 – CES09
At CES this year, there was a major showing of mobile electronics, both OEM and aftermarket. The current housing crisis has helped fuel the demands for this sector in the area of infotainment systems and communication. With the restrictions being placed on credit/loans and the instability of the houseing market, Mobile platforms (cars, RV, etc) are taking on a role of the primary fixed asset.
Xilinx is targetting this sector with a new development board and IP for their automotive grade Vertex 3 products. The new development system is essentially a demo board with I/Os and a rectangular touch screen that is the same size as the development board. The touch screen is provided to display both development and debug capabilitiy for the design, but also help with the application GUI development. This is the same setup that is used for the commercial grade (i.e. non-auto Virtex 3) products. .
IP available for this application is interesting – a number of memory interfaces, embedded CPUs, specialy I/O and the like as would be expected. On the data interchance area, there has been requests to support Firewire (IEEE 1394) as an input source over the USB 3.0 format. As the products are targeted for long use cycles, I expect the USB3 interface IP to be added to the kit shortly to allow the future direction and needs.
Since the new development kit supports a display, both virtual guage builders for drivers displays, heads up displays and device/sensor control. The environment is very straight forward and supports a number of automotive targeted “macro” tasks to minimize design time. Since the development tools also support ehe standard Virtex3 products, simultaneous development of both OEM (automotive grade) and aftermarket (standard commercial grade) designs can occur.
The product support multiple processors cores, memory interface and display interfaces. One of the key new features is the packaging of the system RAM with the FPGA die yeilding a higher reliability and smaller footprint. These development systems and products are currently available and are targeted at drivers display, vehicle comfort (temp, heated seats, etc), navigation control, and in-car entertainment/networking control.
PC