Xilinx announced the availability of a development kit for building embedded processing systems based on PowerPC 440 and MicroBlaze processors. Built around the Virtex-5 FXT FPGA system integration platform, the kit enables both hardware and software designers to quickly architect, develop and debug a wide range of processing applications targeting communications, military, aerospace and many others markets. Starting with the Xilinx Platform Studio and ISE Design Suite design environments, the kit also provides a Virtex-5 FX70T FPGA development board, the ML507, to accelerate system design; Linux reference designs; robust library of processing IP cores; and a USB JTAG download/debug cable.

The ML507 includes flexible on-board memory options as well as many industry-standard connectivity interfaces to complement the Virtex-5 FX70T FPGA device with an integrated high-performance, low-latency PowerPC 440 processing block. The kit includes a pre-built Linux image and embedded processing reference design based on the PowerPC 440 processor, DDR2 memory interface and Gigabit Ethernet interface to help hardware designers get started quickly. They can also build fully customizable designs from scratch using the easy-to-use Base System Builder wizard and add their custom IP using Xilinx Platform Studio.

The ML507 board provides users with a range of high performance I/O interfacing options including standard interfaces like Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express as well as custom interfaces they can develop using the gigabit transceivers available on the Virtex-5 FXT device using SMA connectors. For software development, the kit is supported by the Xilinx Software Development Kit (Eclipse-based development environment with GNU tools) as well as a range of embedded operating systems and real-time operating systems.

The Embedded Development HW/SW Kit – Virtex-5 FX70T FPGA PowerPC & MicroBlaze Processor Edition is available for $2,595 US.