What do you get when you combine the world's most popular microprocessor with the biggest ecosystem and the world's most powerful programmable logic devices? Unparalleled flexibility, performance, scalability, and real-time determinism. This combination allows increased protocol support, I/O expansion, hardware acceleration, and future-proofed designs.

As this year comes to an end, we're taking a moment to reflect on the Adaptive Advantage blogs posted in 2018, covering product news, boards, IP, webinars, partner stories, etc. Here are the top 5 product news stories of 2018 selected by the editors.

Silicon product news dominated the headlines for much of the year. On the other end of the spectrum, boards and software news stories were popular enough to crack the top 5 as well. Read on to see the prominent product news stories of the year.

When you have a great idea but only a little knowledge of the hardware and/or software that you want to use, what should you do? Start taking classes and learning skills one by one or find the right tools that are easy to use? One passionate team at Xilinx was not discouraged when they realized they had limited knowledge of Arm processors and development tools they needed to successfully create a simple but fun game. Let’s hear their story.

I recently attended Xilinx Developer Forum (XDF) in San Jose and there were several interesting updates regarding Xilinx’s innovative Zynq® UltraScale+™ RFSoC products. Here are some highlights for those who missed it.

First, Victor Peng’s keynote presentation on the Versal® portfolio mentioned the Versal AI RF series, which includes both AI Engines and RF sampling converters. This series uses AI Engines to implement most Digital Front End (DFE) functions at lower power compared to traditional programmable logic. More importantly, Victor’s keynote affirms Xilinx is committed to the RF data converter integration roadmap for the long term.