Industry Expert Blogs

With much fanfare Xilinx announced their Zynq line of FPGAs some months ago. Initial versions comprise a pair of hard-IP Cortex-A9 processors surrounded by a sea of programmable logic.

They’re sort of like a super-sized version of Microchip’s PIC10F32X family, which is an 8 bit microcontroller with a small amount of programmable logic (what they calls a “puddle of gates”). Both companies push a new kind of product: instead of an FPGA that happens to have a microprocessor or two, these parts are complete microcontrollers with some (in Xilinx’s case, rather a lot) programmable logic.