Xilinx Automotive (XA) Backgrounder
January 7, 2008
Introduction
The automotive electronics market continues to grow rapidly as Tier One manufacturers seek to differentiate and leverage the capabilities of sophisticated semiconductor products. According to market research firm Strategy Analytics,strong growth is expected in the worldwide market for automotive semiconductors from US$18.8B in CY2007 up to $31.2B in CY2014 (includes sensors). Xilinx is participating in this growth via the wide adoption of itsproducts in the infotainment, in-vehicle networking, driver assistance, and driver information application segments. According to Frost & Sullivan, Xilinx is currently the world’s leading supplier of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs) to the automotive market with 52.7% marketsegment share. To further support widespread customer adoption of Xilinx product offerings for automotive electronic system designs, the company is delivering full IP, OS, software, and development board solutionsfor use with its FPGAs specifically optimized for the needs of automotive applications.
Source: Strategy Analytics (Sept. ’07)
Xilinx Automotive Devices
The Xilinx® Automotive (XA) product family is the industry's leading programmable logic family specifically for automotive applications including infotainment, networking, driver information, and driver assistance. The XA family was launched in October 2004, and this family is ideal for a wide range of advanced automotive electronics applications that benefit from the Xilinx devices' flexibility, reconfigurability and advanced on-chip resources. Because of this, the XASpartan™ product line (including Spartan-IIE, Spartan-3, and Spartan-3E), XA9500XL and XA CoolRunner-II™ families of devices are extensively used in many automotive products today. The Xilinx XAfamilies of FPGAs and CPLDs include both I-Grade (-40oC to 100oC Tj) and Q- Grade (-40oC to 125oC Tj) device offerings, enabling operation over the extended temperature ranges required by the automotive industry.
Xilinx is the PLD industry leader in meeting the automotive industry's production process and quality certification standards. Xilinx consistently raises the bar on quality through continuous improvements and a strong commitment to meeting rigorous requirements associated with certification to industry quality standards. This commitment is underscored by the fact that Xilinx is the largest PLD supplier to hold registrations to ISO-9001, ISO-14001 and ISO/TS16949. Xilinx is also the first to build a complete line of FPGAs and CPLDs that are tested to the Automotive Electronics Council’s AEC-Q100 qualification standard, and is an active member of the AEC Component Technical Committee.
Reaffirmation of Automotive Industry Commitment
In January of 2008, Xilinx reaffirms its commitment to the automotive industry with the expansion of its XA offeringincluding newautomotive-qualified XASpartan-3Afamily and XA Spartan-3A DSPFPGAs. These new devices bring domain-optimized solutions for high I/O-logic ratio and high-bandwidth digital signal processing (DSP) with low power consumption and advanced design security to the development of infotainment, hybrid cluster, and driver assistance systems.
XA Spartan-3A FPGAs offer the highest number of I/O per logic cell with broad connectivity support, providing the ultimate in flexibility and scalability for I/O-intensive display and LED backlight applications. XA Spartan-3A DSP devices add more logic, memory, and XtremeDSP™ slices, packing more raw DSP throughput than any other low-cost PLD device, with parallel processing power on a scale never before seen in automotive electronics. The addition of these two families to the XA portfolio delivers FPGA-based solutions optimized for TFT displays, image and video processing, and in-vehicle networking in automotive applications.
Innovative and Complete Automotive IP and Solutions
In addition to providing semiconductor devices specifically tailored for the automotive market, Xilinx and its Alliance Partners have a suite of intellectual property (IP) offerings targeting specific automotive design needs. Some of the standard IP cores offer popular digital signal processing (DSP) functions, processor and peripherals,and memory functions. For a full list of processing, peripheral and functional IP, please refer to
Xilinx also engages with companies that provide leading-edge, specialist capabilities in key automotive segments such as in-vehicle networking and multimedia. As a team, Xilinx and these companies design flexible and scalable platform solutions that incorporate the XA FPGAs, IP, design and development tools, and software libraries. These Alliancesolutions dramatically reduce customer design cycles, bring advanced technical solutions to the market quickly,and are an integral part of the Xilinx automotive solutions roadmap.
An example of a Xilinx complete automotive solution is the MOST® NIC LogiCORE™ IP Solution – the industry’s only complete programmable MOST® solution on the market. This highly integrated FPGA-based MOST Network Interface Controller solution enables flexible system partitioning for infotainment applications.It consists of three parts enabling rapid development to shorten time to market:
1)XA Electronic Control Unit (ECU) Development Kit
Includes the XA1600E FPGA-based development board
2)Xilinx MOST NIC LogiCore and associated third party IP and software
3)MOCEAN MOST Interface Daughtercard
Summary
In this dynamic and fast growing automotive electronics market, PLDs are quickly gaining acceptance for their flexibility, price-performance and time-to-market benefits. Xilinx is the world leader in automotive PLDs and has established a long-term vision for offeringautomotive-qualified FPGAs and complete solutions including IP, development tools, and softwarespecifically geared for the unique demands of this market. For more information on Xilinx Automotive solutions and XA devices, please visit us on the web at
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