The production silicon will be available late March 2017. We typically need 20 working days to build boards, so if the production devices are released on schedule, we will have UltraZed-EG SOMs with production devices available late April.
Xilinx will be beginning the shipment of the production silicon next week, but Avnet may or may not be their first customer to get the production parts. Upon recieving these production parts, the SOMS will be ready 20 working days after that. I will post back on this topic if I find more information out.
As for Vivado 2017.1, from my understanding it is scheduled to be released sometime this month for public access. I do not know of a hard date, however I am under the assumption it will be near the end of the month. I will post back if I find any more information out in regards to this topic.
If I got an board with ES1 now, do you know if there will be Vivado versions in the future which do not support the engineering samples anymore and will only work with production silicon?
I remember this wasn't the case with the old Zynq 7000, but you also didn't need to get a stupid license from Xilinx to be able to build for ES at all. If I can't use my board (which I just got a week ago) with newer versions of Vivado, that would be a big let-down.
I highly doubt that Xilinx would make the ES1 devices obsolete with their future Vivado releases. This would alienate their existing customers. However, just to double check I am going to suggest that you make a post over at the Xilinx forum to get a validated answer to your question.
We are currently out of stock of the UltraZed ES1 Starter kits. At this time we do not have any plans to build any more UltraZed kits with the ES1 parts. What I mean by this is, our next build will be done using the Production Silicon. These Production Silicon UltraZed kits will be available sometime mid July.
The fastest way you could get an UltraZed kit as of now is to order the Production Silicon kit with an estimated arrival of mid July. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Here are the part # for you to order from
UltraZed Production Silicon Starter Kit - AES-ZU3EG-1-SK-G
UltraZed Production Silicon SOM - AES-ZU3EG-1-SOM-I-G
Quickly checking AvnetExpress.com for the UltraZED Starter Kit shows they expect delivery (to Avnet?) by 8/9/2017. Not sure exactly what that means for ordering/receiving one though.
I tried to paste the link but couldn't for some reason.
