Xilinx Wins VDC's Hardware Embeddy Award at ESC Silicon Valley 2010

On Thursday afternoon of ESC Silicon Valley, VDC awarded its bi-annual Embeddy Awards. These awards are handed out at the ESC Silicon Valley show in the Spring and the ESC Boston show in the Fall. The purpose of the award is to recognize innovation within the embedded systems market by selecting one software winner and one hardware winner who have displayed an exceptional new technology at the show that must be both innovative and commercially compelling.

We are proud to announce this year’s hardware winner:

Xilinx for its new Extensible Processing Platform which combines a Xilinx FPGA with a dual core ARM Cortex CPU core implemented inside of the FPGA.

The combination of CPU cores (both soft and hard) inside of FPGAs to create programmable SoCs is one of the most important and most powerful trends that VDC is tracking in the embedded market today. And this announcement of not only a collaboration but also of a clear family of processors built on two established architectures represents the most well defined and most concrete product roadmap for FPGA + CPU that we have seen to date. By bringing together Xilinx and ARM, Xilinx will be able to offer customers architectures that are well established and stable within the industry and also heavily supported with development talent and tools since this creates a partnership between the largest FPGA supplier with the largest processor IP supplier.

FPGA + CPU combinations provide a level of versatility and programmability that is unrivaled in most other processing platforms and although not a fit for every application these platforms provide a great alternative to ASIC and even general purpose CPU architectures in many embedded applications. While high in performance, it is the programmability of these platforms that is the key to their potential and success. The programmability provides not only ease of use, but also obsolescence/lifecycle protection.

By creating a CPU/FPGA partnership of such heft we believe that Xilinx and ARM have set themselves up to be leaders in this space and we applaud the announcement of the Xilinx platform. It will be a great solution to provide a combination of serial and parallel processing in a programmable package for the next generation of complex embedded applications.

As always we saw a lot of innovation at this year’s show and as always it was difficult to select a winner. We look forward to seeing even more innovation at Boston in the Fall!