Xilinx, Inc. is making a number of announcements in conjunction with Xilinx Adapt 2021, the company’s virtual technology conference taking place September 7-16. News highlights include the latest Versal™ space and defense-grade devices, a new Microsoft database analytics service powered by Alveo™ accelerator cards, a software development kit (SDK) for live video transcoding, the Kria™ robotics stack, a new Vitis™ library for medical ultrasound, and the new Zynq® RFSoC DFE shipping in production volume to radio customers worldwide.

Adapt 2021 will feature executive keynotes with appearances from partners and customers, along with a series of more than 100 presentations, forums, product trainings and labs designed to help users unlock the value of adaptive computing. The free, six-day event kicks off this week with three days of content targeting software and hardware developers. The final three days next week will focus on the company’s broad end market segments, with dedicated sessions covering aerospace and defense, automotive, data center, industrial, healthcare and wired and wireless businesses.

“From the data center and 5G to robotics and space-grade devices, we’re looking forward to kicking off Xilinx Adapt 2021 to educate customers and developers on our newest products and tools across our diversified end markets. We’re excited to share how adaptive computing is helping customers realize great innovations and bring them to market faster than ever,” said Victor Peng, Xilinx president and CEO.

Adapt 2021 news highlights for next week’s end market segments-focused conference includes the following:

Aerospace and Defense

Xilinx is launching two new versions of its Versal ACAP products with the addition of the space-grade XQR Versal portfolio and the defense-grade XQ ruggedized Versal portfolio.

Space-Grade Versal ACAP

The XQR Versal space-grade portfolio includes the new Versal AI Core and Versal AI Edge series devices, offering ruggedized, organic ball grid array packaging with extended qualification and burn-in supporting Mil-Std-883 Class B-grade flow and full radiation tolerance. These XQR devices are targeted for on-board data processing and machine learning (ML) inference in satellite and space 2.0 applications, an important accelerated advancement building upon the successful adoption of XQRKU060 launch in 2020.

The XQR Versal ACAP is a highly capable and adaptable device with support for full reconfiguration while in orbit. The space-grade XQR Versal AI Core device is targeted for availability in late Q2 2022.

Defense-Grade Versal ACAP

The XQ ruggedized devices are heterogeneous multicore compute platforms equipped with adaptable industry-leading AI/ML capabilities to withstand the evolving algorithms and demands of harsh environmental requirements for aerospace and defense applications. Building on Xilinx’s 30 years of heritage and continuous development in the industry, the latest portfolio includes the XQ AI Core, XQ AI Edge, XQ Prime and XQ Premium families. The devices in the portfolio feature ruggedized packaging qualified to Mil-Std-883 Group D standards, tin-lead (Sn/Pb) content with full mitigation of tin-whiskering, and optional M-temp (-55°C to +125°C) support. The XQ ruggedized Versal portfolio is targeted for initial device availability in Q1 2022.

Automotive

Xilinx® FPGAs and adaptive SoCs bring tremendous value to LiDAR sensor architectures because of the capability to support advanced signal processing, point cloud pre-processing and point cloud ML acceleration. Xilinx is the leading silicon supplier in the LiDAR market.

New Automotive LiDAR Research from Xilinx and Strategy Analytics

According to a new Xilinx-sponsored report from Strategy Analytics, about $1 billion has been invested in up to 100 different companies developing high-resolution LiDAR sensors, and automotive market adoption is accelerating. Xilinx FPGAs and adaptive SoCs are being deployed in these systems because they provide extreme flexibility and adaptability, deliver high performance at low latency, and help meet fast time-to-market timeframes. Mark Fitzgerald, director for Strategy Analytics’ Autonomous Vehicle Service, will join Xilinx at Adapt for a fireside chat to discuss the report findings and provide a market forecast on September 15 at 11 a.m. PT. Jim Kane, vice president of Automotive Engineering, at Baraja will also join Xilinx and Strategy Analytics for this conversation. A copy of the “Automotive LiDAR: Rounding Out the ADAS and Autonomous Driving Sensor Suite” report can be found in the Adapt 2021 media kit.

Data Center

Xilinx data center platforms and plug-in board solutions continue to drive strong demand across hyperscale cloud customers and the fintech market.

Azure Synapse Spark Acceleration

Microsoft has announced that Azure is now utilizing their NP-VM FPGA-as-a-Service infrastructure, powered by Xilinx® Alveo™ accelerators, to dramatically improve the performance of Apache Spark on the Azure Synapse analytics platform. Alveo acceleration delivers up to a 40x improvement in data parsing CSV and JSON file formats, from 15 MB/second with a CPU core to 7.7 GB/second with Alveo. This eliminates a common bottleneck in Spark performance, and with 90 percent of Synapse Spark workloads consisting of CSV/JSON/Parquet files, Azure is delivering massively enhanced performance to their growing Synapse customer base.

Live Video Transcoding SDK

Xilinx has released the Xilinx Video Transcoding SDK, making it easier and faster than ever before for streamers to build new or migrate existing services to take advantage of Xilinx acceleration. The Video Transcoding SDK is a complete solution, from runtime drivers to server resource management, and provides support for FFmpeg and C/C++ API, ensuring that customers can start developing streaming solutions instantly. Paired with the Xilinx Alveo U30 media accelerator card, it delivers industry-leading video transcoding performance with dramatically improved channel density, lower power and total cost of ownership compared to alternative products.

Industrial and Healthcare

Xilinx addresses the growing needs of scalable healthcare and industrial IoT platforms with heterogenous processing, I/O flexibility, hardware-based deterministic control and comprehensive solutions.

Kria Robotics Stack

Xilinx is expanding the scope of Kria System-on-Modules beyond vision AI and is now equipping roboticists with an easy-to-use, adaptive and hardware-accelerated set of functions and tools called the Kria robotics stack (KRS). Built around the Robot Operating System (ROS), a framework for robot application development, KRS is comprised of an integrated set of utilities helping speed up ROS 2 and Gazebo, empowering faster, secure and more complete robot behavior. KRS ships with an expanding set of reference designs and over time, robotic-focused accelerated applications built with KRS will be made available via the Xilinx App Store. KRS helps leverage hardware acceleration into Xilinx devices with high performance and low latency, in a similar fashion to how Vitis AI helps AI developers implement ML inference models into Xilinx devices.

Vitis Libraries for Medical Ultrasound

For the first time, Xilinx has expanded its Vitis unified software platform to include libraries for ultra-fast imaging optimized and targeted for the innovative Versal AI engines. These libraries target medical ultrasound applications, producing breakthrough performance resulting in greater than 1,000 frames-per-second in a 64-channel ultrasound machine with 200 lines of resolution using just a single Versal device.

Wired and Wireless Communications

From edge to cloud, Xilinx FPGAs and adaptive SoCs continue to be at the heart of wired and wireless networking equipment driving global 5G deployments.

Xilinx Shipping Zynq RFSoC DFE in Volume

Xilinx has begun shipping its new Zynq RFSoC DFE in volume to multiple radio customers worldwide including a top wireless system vendor. Zynq RFSoC DFE is a new class of radio platforms that integrates hardened digital front-end (DFE) application-specific blocks for 5G NR performance and power savings while also offering integrated programmable adaptive logic to enable a futureproof solution for evolving 5G 3GPP standards and O-RAN radio architectures. Zynq RFSoC DFE is gaining momentum in the market because it optimizes power efficiency, performance and cost while still delivering the flexibility and time-to-market benefits of a programmable and adaptive SoC.