It’s uncommon to discover a growth board that’s helpful for each the skilled engineer and the hobbyist, however the Avnet ZUBoard 1CG bridges the hole. On the coronary heart of the Avnet ZUBoard 1CG is the AMD Zynq™ UltraScale™ XCZU1CG MPSoC in a 484 pin package deal. This gadget is the smallest of the AMD Zynq™ UltraScale™ household and falls inside the Price Optimized Portfolio.
On this article, we’re going to take a deep dive into the ZUBoard 1CG, the important thing parts and interfaces it gives, and the strategies of creating options.
The SoC
Though it’s inside the Price Optimized vary, the AMD Zynq™ UltraScale™ XCZU1CG MPSoC remains to be an exceptionally succesful gadget. It gives builders with twin core Arm® Cortex®-A53 64-bit processors inside the software processing unit (APU). Every of the Arm® Cortex®-A53 processors additionally accommodates a NEON unit. The NEON unit permits Single Instruction A number of Knowledge operations to be carried out utilizing each floating and integer operations for vector processing purposes. This assist for SIMD makes the A53 processors inside the APU excellent for picture and video processing. Along with the floating level and SIMD extensions, the A53 processors additionally present the developer with cryptographic accelerators. These cryptographic accelerators allow acceleration of AES, SHA and finite discipline arithmetic, which assist elliptic curve cryptography.
The Arm Cortex-A53 processors are coupled with twin core Arm® Cortex®-R5 processors. These processors are inside the real-time unit and meant for real-time purposes that assist requirements corresponding to IEC61508 or ISO26262. To assist this, the R5 processors run in lock step and the tightly coupled recollections implement a single error correction and double error detection. The tightly coupled reminiscence (TCM) permits each low latency and deterministic entry to RAM. A complete of 128KB of TCM is supplied.
Along with the APU and RPU, a variety of peripherals are supplied inside the processing system. These vary from high-speed interfaces, corresponding to Show Port, SATA, USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, SPI, UART, CAN, I2C and GPIO. The precise configuration of the processor I/O might be chosen because of the multiplex I/O (MIO) within the processing system.
Alongside the options described above, which comprise the processing system, the AMD Zynq™ UltraScale™XCZZU1CG MPSoC additionally gives programmable logic. A number of high-speed Arm® eXtensible Interface (AXI) connections allow the processor’s deal with area to change information between the PS and PL, and the processing system applications the programmable logic.
The board and energy
The ZUBoard 1CG is a compact growth board that operates from a USB-C energy provide at 15 volts. The facility system generates the rails crucial for the powering of the AMD Zynq™ UltraScale™ XCZU1CG MPSoC mounter on the board (0.85v, 1.8v, 1.2v and 1.1v). It additionally generates 3.3V and 5V for the person I/O. The board additionally comes with a coin cell battery, which powers the real-time clock within the AMD Zynq UltraScale XCZU1CG MPSoC. It additionally has a battery backed RAM used for safe boot.
As can be anticipated, the ZUBoard 1CG gives builders with a variety of reminiscence and interface options.
The board gives 256Mb of QSPI reminiscence. It additionally has a micro-SD card slot, the place these recollections can be utilized because the supply of the boot information for the person software. To run the working system and retailer software information, the board additionally gives 1GB of LPDDR4 reminiscence. Whereas that is related to the processing system of the AMD Zynq UltraScale+ XCZU1CG MPSoC, it may be simply accessed by the programmable logic and used for information shops and body buffers (if crucial).
In the case of interfacing the ZUBoard 1CG, the board gives a variety of ordinary interfaces which might be seen on most growth environments. These embody USB 2.0 Host, 1 Gig Ethernet, USB UART, and JTAG. This permits builders to simply create purposes that run on the processing system and exploit conventional computing interfaces. Permitting builders to create networked options utilizing Ethernet whereas connecting generally used sensor peripherals utilizing the USB hub.
One of many spotlight options of the ZUBoard 1CG is its interfacing, which is supplied by the high-speed growth interfaces. These growth interfaces escape alerts from each the programmable logic and the processing system. From the programmable logic, excessive efficiency logic alerts are damaged out whereas logic stage MIO are damaged out together with Gigabit Serial Hyperlinks from the processing system. These gigabit serial hyperlinks allow builders to implement USB 3.0 interfaces and Show Port outputs. The availability of processing system MIO permits the boot units, corresponding to eMMC, for use on growth boards.
These high-speed growth ports are related to a variety of peripherals from twin cameras to eMMC and Show Port outputs. There are additionally a variety of third-party excessive velocity appropriate boards that present ADC and DAC interfacing capabilities
Together with the high-speed interfacing resolution, the ZUBoard 1CG additionally gives a MIKROE Click on website. This Click on website helps the extensive ecosystem of boards supplied by MIKROE. These click on boards present numerous interfacing capabilities, from motor drive to wi-fi communication.
Outdoors of the high-speed interfacing and Click on websites, the ZUBoard 1CG additionally gives builders with strain and temperature sensors situated onboard.
Creating options
In the case of creating options for the ZUBoard 1CG, we use a number of purposes from AMD. These embody:
- AMD Vivado™ Design Suite – That is used to configure the processing system, together with capturing the programmable logic design.
- AMD Vitis™ Unified Software program Platform – This can be utilized to create and debug naked metallic software program purposes for the APU and RPU, and to generate embedded Linux purposes for the APU.
- PetaLinux Instruments – Helps the creation of embedded Linux options for AMD FPGA and SoC units.
- AMD PYNQ™ Framework – Offers a Python-based framework to allow management and information change with programmable logic designs.
This resolution stack permits builders to have the ability to create options from easy logic designs to options, which execute naked metallic purposes all the best way to embedded Linux. Whereas AMD PYNQ Framework permits builders to have the ability to leverage the productiveness efficiency gained through the use of Python mixed with the efficiency supplied by programmable logic.
To provide some thought of how highly effective the ZUBoard 1CG is, we will have a look at its capabilities for accelerating features from the processing system to the programmable logic. This makes use of a design created inside the AMD Vivado Design Suite software program to implement a Quick Fourier Rework, a typical function of many sign processing algorithms. We will offload the processing of this algorithm from the processor to the programmable logic. Utilizing this AMD Vivado Design Suite software program design mixed with AMD PYNQ Framework permits the developer to simply benchmark the capabilities of the programmable logic acceleration. As the dimensions of the FFT calculation will increase, the FFT carried out in {hardware} additionally will increase in efficiency considerably.
This functionality to mix offload options from the programmable logic to the FPGA demonstrates the facility of ZUBoard 1CG.
Nonetheless, it’s not simply the standalone capabilities of the board and the SoC that make this appropriate for each skilled and makers alike. It’s the mixture of the board, the SoC and the instrument chain that present the developer with an exceptionally succesful platform at an awesome worth level.
If you wish to get began with the ZUBoard 1CG, take a look at the tasks and blogs under.
AMD, and the AMD Arrow emblem, PYNQ, UltraScale+, Vivado, Vitis, Zynq and combos thereof are emblems of Superior Micro Gadgets, Inc.
