Xilinx has delivered a pair of new, 16-nm FinFET+, automotive-qualified FPGAs that target advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and self-driving cars. The Xilinx Automotive (XA) Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC 7EV and 11EG (Fig. 1) combine 64-bit, hard-core Arm processors with over 650,000 programmable logic cells and nearly 3,000 DSP slices. This represents 2.5 times the performance of its previous automotive platforms.
1. The Automotive Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC 7EV and 11EG FPGAs combine a hard core, application processing block, a real-time multicore processor, and graphics unit with a large FPGA fabric.
The XA 7EV adds a video-codec unit for h.264/h.265 encode and decode. It can handle 4Kx2K video streams up to 60 frames/s. The XA 11EG includes 32 12.5-Gb/s transceivers plus four PCIe Gen3 x16 blocks. The processor portion of the chips includes quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 and dual-core Arm Cortex-R5 processors. These are certified to ASIL-C level in the low-power domain. This MPSoC portfolio is qualified according to AEC-Q100 test specifications.
“The new additions to our automotive portfolio expand our proven offering to the market,” says Emre Onder, senior vice president, marketing, Xilinx. “Through customer-driven requests, we’ve broadened our XA product family to meet the complex levels of today’s ADAS and autonomous driving systems. With these additions to the Zynq UltraScale+ product line, Xilinx delivers unmatched processing flexibility and scalability vital for today’s rapidly changing requirements. Whether customers are developing for L1 or for L4 systems, we have a solution that meets their needs.”
2. Xilinx’s Vitis is designed to map applications across multiple targets from processors to the cloud.
The XA devices are supported by the Vitis and Vitis AI unified software platform (Fig. 2). Based on optimized open-source libraries, they’re available for immediate download and free of charge. Vitis is designed to use existing software tools and frameworks that developers already know. For example, Vitis works with existing development platforms like Visual Studio Code and Eclipse. Vitis consists primarily of command-line applications that easily integrate with current development flows and tools.
