MicroZed OTG

Question

Hi,

A few questions, the ideal goal is to be able to connect a computer to the MicroZed, preferably using a single USB cable which will deliver power and data.

1. Just verifying, the micro usb input is the one which can be used for OTG?

2. What throughput can be expected when doing data transfer between 2 computers connected using OTG? Will it be the throughput of USB2(480Mbit)? Or are we talking only of the USB UART Serial COM which is very slow (~12500bps)?

Regards,

Tomer Gal

drozwood90 · Accepted Answer

Hi there,

The MicroUSB is used as a UART on the terminal. The USB-OTG is on the same connector as the Tri-Ethernet. You can see this in the block diagram contained in the product brief.
http://microzed.org/sites/default/files/product_briefs/pb-microzed-eval-v2a.pdf

You can also see the USB-OTG on the "Side View" picture under the product page:
http://microzed.org/product/microzed

As for the speed. The Terminal is slow UART speeds as it is intended as a terminal. The OTG is USB OTG HIGH SPEED 2.0 per UG585 - page 34.
http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/user_guides/ug585-Zynq-7000-TRM.pdf

The protocol is rated at 480Mbps. You would need to be careful where you are putting the data and what you are doing with it as this is an embedded platform, so it is more sensitive to what you do with the data.

Although, you will find that with DMA and other AXI based interfaces you have a wide range of ability to deal with the large volume of data that USB could create. Just keep in mind that there will be overhead depending on what you are running on the Zynq - be it bare-metal or Linux, or even some RTOS as well as where you can consuming the data (PS vs PL).

If you have large volumes of data you need to work with, you might also consider our PicoZed platform as that can be purchased with a Zynq 7030, which can run at a higher clock speed as well as has access to Kintex based fabric, which runs faster than the Artix-7 based fabric of the Zynq 7010. You can also get the PicoZed in a 7015 size, both the 7015 and 7030 based PicoZeds contain transceivers - which can handle much more volume of data than USB will. If you are new to transceivers we have a new kit called the Avnet Zynq Transceiver Evaluation Kit (AZTEK for short!), which contains all the cables and accessories that are necessary in order to run data at rates faster than 3.5Gbps!

--Dan