Introduction to Smarter Systems

The global electronics industry is undergoing a transition to smarter systems. The drivers behind this change are all connected to

requirements involving efficiency, productivity, security, quality, and of course cost. The enemy is waste. Systems reduce waste

when they use only the required resources to deliver only the desired goods and services when and where they are needed. The

opportunity is intelligence. Systems that can make their own decisions can change the role of electronics in our businesses and

everyday lives. To achieve these goals, systems must be able to obtain, process, interpret, and make choices based on a wide

variety of information from remote and local databases, sensor data, and many other dispersed inputs.

What does this transition to smarter systems mean to system vendors? It means that there must be more decision-making

technology and intellectual property. The networks that convey essential information are being transformed from dumb pipes to

The Xilinx Zynq™-7000 All Programmable SoC is the ideal platform to infuse intelligence into today’s embedded systems. It is

All Programmable, meaning that not only can one add systems intelligence through software, but additional data processing and

decisions can be executed in real time with programmable

hardware and system interfaces can be optimized and evolved

through programmable I/O. All this intelligence can be added

with low design costs and tremendous flexibility to change

the design or upgrade in the field. It also enables a significant

level of programmable systems integration, including CPU,

DSP, ASSP, FPGA, and mixed signal functionality. This leads

to lower BOM cost, higher systems performance, and lower

Cortex™-A9 MPCore processors with the industry’s fastest

and most advanced 28nm FPGA fabric, multiple high-speed

serial transceivers, and an on-chip analog-processing block

that incorporates two 1Msamples/sec A/D converters.

Xilinx recently introduced a fifth member of the Zynq-7000

THREE PROGRAMMABLE ASPECTS OF THE ZYNQ7000

enhanced DSP resources in the FPGA fabric. All five Zynq

devices are optimized for specific combinations of system

power, cost, and size.

Xilinx is leading the industry to usher in the trend to smarter

systems with application-focused solutions for smarter

networks, data centers, and vision-based systems. These

solutions build on the Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC with

an ever expanding portfolio of building blocks for smarter

systems called SmartCORE™ IP, a new generation of design

tools called Vivado™ that includes the ability to design at

of system-design problems in all markets, across the entire

application spectrum. Here are 9 reasons why this is true:

Reason 1: Most efficient ARM+FPGA for analytics

and control

A 1GHz, dual-core, hardened implementation of the ARM

Cortex-A9 MPCore microprocessor sits at the heart of each Zynq All Programmable SoC. The two ARM processors communicate

with on-chip memory, SDRAM and Flash memory controllers, and peripheral blocks through the ARM AMBA AXI-based

interconnect. Together, these hardened blocks constitute the Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC’s Processor System (PS).

The on-chip PS is attached to the Zynq device’s on-chip

Programmable Logic (PL) through multiple ARM AMBA AXI

Zynq PS to the PL.

The number and size of these ARM AXI PS-PL connections is

a critical architectural choice—a choice based on a careful

consideration of the bandwidth requirements of the Zynq PS.

The four 64/32-bit configurable, high-performance AXI ports

provide the PL with direct, high-speed access to the Zynq-

7000 All Programmable SoC’s on-chip memory and SDRAM

controller through four independent 1Kbyte FIFO buffers. In

this way, several separate hardware accelerators implemented

in the Zynq PL can have independent, high-speed access to a

SPANNING A RANGE OF APPLICATIONS