Reference designs smooth path to power solutions

Each reference design, which provides customers with an easy way to prototype their designs before fully understanding their power needs, is a scalable power supply designed to provide power to the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ family of FPGA-based MPSoC devices.

The designs receive power from a standard DC power supply and provide power to all rails of the Xilinx chipset and DDR memory through a well-defined Samtec socket-terminal strip connection.

The Integrated Power Supply Reference Design for Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ZU2CG−ZU5EV MPSoCs is scalable to support ZU2CG-ZU3EG devices.

In addition, the Integrated Power Supply Reference Design for Xilinx Artix-7 and Spartan-7 FPGAs, and Zynq-7000 SoCs is further scalable to support the most basic Spartan-7 FPGA device, a more complex Artix-7 FPGA with multigigabit transceivers, and up to the Zynq-7000 SoC with a dual-core Arm Cortex-A9 processor.

As the two reference designs share the same concept and prototype PCB, customers can use the same power design across the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ family and the Xilinx cost-optimised portfolio. Power solutions for devices of this type typically require custom power-management ICs or use many discrete power regulators to provide power to FPGA platforms.

The new solution results in a scalable design which features a configurable PMIC and individually selected discrete components.

The solution size is optimised for each assembly variant, with power building blocks selected depending on the Xilinx product. In early prototyping, the Texas Instruments reference designs can be used for power-on scenarios. For the final design, the power solution can be implemented as the smallest solution size.

The result is an elegant and scalable solution which enables designers using both the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ family and the Xilinx cost-optimised products (Artix-7, Spartan-7, and Zynq-7000) to create a reusable power platform.

A typical application example would be a power solution for customers designing an industrial robot using a ZU+ as the central computer and multiple Spartan-7s for motor control of the axis. This solution powers both chipsets.