Anyone creating a complex, powerful digital design may want to turn to a single device that integrates high-speed processing and programmable logic.
In Circuit Cellar’s April issue, columnist Colin O’Flynn explores using the Xilinx Zynq Z-7020 All Programmable SoC (system-on-a-chip) as part of the Avnet ZedBoard development board.
“I used a Xilinx Zynq SoC device, although Altera offers several flavors of a similar device (e.g., the Cyclone V SoC, the Arria V SoC, and the Arria 10 SoC), and Microsemi offers the SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA,” O’Flynn says in his article. “The Xilinx and Altera devices feature a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, whereas the Microsemi devices feature a less powerful Cortex-M3 processor. You may not need a dual-core A9 processor, so ‘less powerful’ may be an advantage.”
While O’Flynn’s article introduces the ZedBoard, he notes many of its specifics also apply to the MicroZed board, a less expensive option with a smaller SoC. Xilinx’s Zynq device has many interesting applications made highly accessible through the ZedBoard and MicroZed boards, he says.
O’Flynn’s discussion of the Zynq SoC device includes the following excerpt. (The April issue, which includes O’Flynn’s full article, is available for membership download or single-issue purchase.)
WHERE’S THE BEEF?
Originally, I had planned to describe a complete demo project in this article. I was going to demonstrate how to use a combination of a custom peripheral and some of the hard cores to stream data from a parallel ADC device into DDR memory. But there wasn’t enough room to introduce the tools and cover the demo, so I decided to introduce the Zynq device (using the ZedBoard).
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A demo project is available at ProgrammableLogicInPractice.com. Several tutorials for the Zynq device are available at xilinx.com and zedboard.org, so there isn’t any point in duplicating work! I’ve linked to some specific tutorials from the April 2014 post on ProgrammableLogicInPractice.com. Photo 1 shows the hardware I used, which includes a ZedBoard with my custom OpenADC board connected through the I/O lines.
Photo 1: An Avnet ZedBoard is connected to the OpenADC. The OpenADC provides a moderate-speed ADC (105 msps), which interfaces to the programmable logic (PL) fabric in Xilinx’s Zynq device via a parallel data bus. The PL fabric then maps itself as a peripheral on the hard-core processing system (PS) in the Zynq device to stream this data into the system DDR memory.
FPGA PROCESSOR DESIGN 101
Even if you’re experienced in FPGA design, you may not have used Xilinx tools for processor-specific design. These tools include the Xilinx Platform Studio (XPS) and the Xilinx Software Development Kit (SDK). Before the advent of hard-core processors (e.g., Zynq), there have long existed soft-core processors, including the popular Xilinx MicroBlaze soft processor. The MicroBlaze system is completely soft core, so you can use the XPS tool to define the peripherals you wish to include. For the Zynq device, several hard-core peripherals are always present and you can choose to add additional soft-core (i.e., use the FPGA fabric) peripherals.
In a future article I will discuss different soft-core processor options, including some open-source third-party ones that can be programmed from the Arduino environment. For now, I’ll examine only the Xilinx tools, which are applicable to the Zynq device, along with the MicroBlaze core.
The ARM cores in the Zynq device are well suited to run Linux, which gives you a large range of existing code and tools to use in your overall solution. If you don’t need those tools, you can always run on “bare metal” (e.g., without Linux), as the tools will generate a complete base project for you that compiles and tests the peripherals (e.g., printing “Hello World” out the USART). To give you a taste of this, I’ve posted a demo video of bringing up a simple “Hello World” project in both Linux and bare metal systems on ProgrammableLogicInPractice.com.
The FPGA part of the Zynq device is called the programmable logic (PL) portion. The ARM side is called the processing system (PS) portion. You will find a reference to the SoC’s PL or PS portion throughout most of the tutorials (along with this article), so it’s important to remember which is which!
For either system, you’ll be starting with the XPS software (see Photo 2). This software is used to design your hardware platform (i.e., the PL fabric), but it also gives you some customization of the PS hard-core peripherals.
Photo 2: This is the main screen of the Xilinx Platform Studio (XPS) when configuring a Zynq design. On the left you can see the list of available soft-core peripherals to add to the design. You can configure any of the hard-core peripherals by choosing to enable or disable them, along with selecting from various possible I/O connections. Additional screens (not shown) enable you to configure peripherals addressing information, configure I/O connections for the soft-core peripherals, and connect peripherals to various available extension buses.
MAKING THE CONNECTION
For example, clicking on the list of hard-core peripherals opens the options dialogue so you can enable or disable each peripheral along with routing the I/O connections. The ZedBoard’s Zynq device has 54 multipurpose I/O (MIO) lines that can be used by the peripherals, which are split into two banks. Each bank can use different I/O standards (e.g., 3.3 and 1.5 V).
Enabling all the peripherals would take a lot more than 54 I/O lines. Therefore, most of the I/O lines share multiple functions on the assumption that every peripheral doesn’t need to be connected. Many of the peripherals can be connected to several different I/O locations, so you (hopefully) don’t run into two peripherals needing the same I/O pin.
Almost all of the peripheral outputs can be routed to the PL fabric as well under the name EMIO, which is a dedicated 64-bit bus that connects to the PL fabric. If you simply wish to get more I/O pins, you can configure these extra pins from within XPS. But you can also use this EMIO bus to control existing cores in your FPGA fabric using peripherals on the Zynq device.
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Assume you had an existing FPGA design where you had an FPGA core doing some processing connected to a microcontroller or computer via I2C, SPI, or serial. You could simply connect this core to the appropriate PS peripheral and port the existing code onto the Zynq processor by changing the low-level calls to use the Zynq peripherals. You may eventually wish to change this interface to the peripheral bus, the AMBA Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI), for better performance. However, using standard peripherals to interface to a PL design can still be useful for many cores for which you have extensive existing code.
The MIO/EMIO pins can even be used in a bit-banging fashion, so if you need a special device or core control logic, it’s possible to quickly develop this in software. You can then move to a hardware peripheral for considerably better performance.
O’Flynn’s article goes on to discuss in greater detail the internal buses, peripherals, and taking a design from hardware to software. For more, refer to Circuit Cellar‘s April issue and related application notes posted at O’Flynn’s companion site ProgrammableLogicInPractice.com.
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Circuit Cellar's editorial team comprises professional engineers, technical editors, and digital media specialists. You can reach the Editorial Department at editorial@circuitcellar.com, @circuitcellar, and facebook.com/circuitcellar
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