Products

One of my most common customer requests is to speed up execution of a software application using FPGA hardware acceleration. If the application runs on a PC or server, you can achieve impressive performance gains by using off-the-shelf FPGA development boards for PCI Express.

Here is a comparison of the available 7 Series FPGA boards for PCI Express applications:

• (*) Note: These HPC FMC connectors are only partially populated which means that they wont be able to support all standard FMCs.
• There are many more FPGA boards for PCIe on the market, but I chose to limit the comparison to those that are more strongly supported by Xilinx.

The reason these types of boards are so useful in the hardware acceleration space is because PCI Express is the highest bandwidth, lowest latency link that you can have between a PC’s CPU and an external FPGA. There’s no use shipping off work to an FPGA if the time it takes the data to get there and back is more than the time saved through improved processing efficiency.

If you’re interested in testing out the Zynq-7000 SoC from Xilinx there are now quite a few options available, so it comes down to a question of features vs price. Below I’ve listed the most important features of the available boards side-by-side to help you make the right decision for yourself or your company. I’ll also go into what I think of each board before we look at the boards in terms of their popularity.

I just received the Zynq-7000 based ZC706 development board from a new client and I’m pretty excited to start working on it. This is the first time that I’ll be working on the Zynq FPGA, part of the latest series 7 devices from Xilinx, so over the next few days, I’ll be writing about my experiences while getting familiar with the board, the FPGA and version 14.5 of the Xilinx development tools. If I get time later, I might dive into the new Vivado Design Suite, promoted by Xilinx to be a “revolutionary IP-centric and system-centric design environment for dramatically faster integration and implementation” - we’ll see about that.

Forget about the ML505. The ML605 just made it obsolete. Not because of the Virtex-6 or the 8-lane PCIe or the DDR3… You need the ML605 because it has two FMC expansion connectors, one high-pin count and one low-pin count. You could do practically anything with this board. Why do I like it? Because for once we have a board that lets you interface real data at a high throughput to a beast of an FPGA.

Hardware Details

The Xilinx University Program Virtex-II Pro (XUPV2P) Development System from Digilent is a development board for the Virtex-II Pro FPGA. It contains many useful hardware features including:

• Xilinx Virtex-II Pro XC2VP30 FPGA
• 10/100Mbps Ethernet PHY
• USB port
• Compact Flash card slot
• XSGA Video port
• Audio Codec
• SATA connectors (2 hosts, 1 target)
• PS/2 and RS-232 ports
• High and Low Speed expansion connectors

Virtex-II Pro FPGA Details

The XUPV2P is loaded with a Virtex-II Pro FPGA:

Hardware Details

The ML505 Evaluation Platform from Xilinx is a development board for the Virtex-5 FPGA. It contains many useful hardware features including:

• Xilinx Virtex-5 XC5VLX50T FPGA
• 10/100/1000 tri-speed Ethernet PHY
• USB host and peripheral controllers
• Programmable system clock generator
• Stereo AC97 codec with line in, line out, headphone, microphone, and SPDIF digital audio jacks
• PS/2 (2) – Keyboard, Mouse
• RS-232 port
• 16x2 character LCD
• Video Input
• Video (DVI/VGA) Output
• DIP Switch (8), LEDs (8), and Pushbuttons (5)
• PCI Express® Edge Connector (x1 Endpoint)
• SFP (1000Base-X)

Below are several frequently asked questions about the ML505/6/7 and XUPV5 boards. Click on the question to jump to the answer. If you have a question about the ML505/6/7 or XUPV5 boards, please contact us at the email address given at the end of this page.

• What is the speed grade of Virtex-5 on my ML505/ML506/ML507/XUPV5 board?
• What are the differences between the ML505/6/7 and XUPV5 boards?
• What is the XUPV5 (ML509) board?
• Why cant I find the XUPV5 (or ML509) board in the Base System Builder (BSB)?
• I have a design for an ML50x board (eg. ML505) that I want to migrate to a different ML50x board (eg. ML509). What do I have to change?
• The Virtex-5 on my ML50x board gets very hot when in use. What should I do about it?
• How can I buy an ML50x board and how much does it cost?