Designing the Ultimate System Integration Platform with 65nm FPGAs

FPGAs have outpaced other technologies in providing system designers with a platform to develop products with seemingly competing requirements. This paper describes the latest generation of 65-nm platform FPGAs, using the Xilinx Virtex-5 LXT FPGA as an example, and how they enable designers to create solutions with the use of embedded transceivers processors and built-in IP blocks. These on-chip resources provide system designers with increased flexibility to target system architectures needing high bandwidth, low latency and low power. The Xilinx Virtex-5 LXT FPGA enables system integration on a single device with the following advantages: higher speed logic resources packed in a denser footprint; transceiver blocks supporting different high-speed serial linerates from 100Mbps to 3.2Gbps; high speed, on-chip memory resources and memory interface capabilities; high speed DSP slices parallelizing signal processing functions; and abundant choice of hard IP blocks guaranteeing functionality and easing timing closure.