In Search of RoadTesters to Take On The All Programmable SoC (AVNET MiniZed RoadTest)

Randall,

I just browsed a bit through the Zynq book (but it's a lot 484 pages), and I wondered how you use that thing...

Is it like a raspberry pi and can you run python code on it? Or is it more like an Arduino and you'll need an IDE for it? How does this device compare to the previous mentioned platforms?

It looks nice, but up to now I don't know what to do with it.

kind regards,

Reinoud

Its an FPGA... So no not Arduino or Raspberry Pi. This you need to implement the digital logic. Therefore everything runs in hardware and not software making the overall system run alot faster as well as having the ability to run multiple threads truly simultaneously not using time division or anything like that. This is a very different beast. FPGAs powerful, efficient but a whole different world when it comes to programing.

Kas

Disclaimer, this is based om my basic understanding of FPGAs and not from any indepth understanding or usage.

I browsed a little further, it seems that you'll need an IDE like tool for it: Vivado.

https://www.xilinx.com/video/hardware/getting-started-with-the-vivado-ide.html

https://www.xilinx.com/support/download.html

But I agree with some others: there's quite a learning curve here...

I guess this is not for me...

Interesting... I can't even open that page because my Firefox (version 57.0.1) is "too old", despite being installed this morning. I was curious about looking into the IDE, but this roadtest clearly isn't for me

FPGA are not the kind of devices you program in software. They are no CPUs or MCUs. These are devices where you can create the hardware you need, and then it interacts with the software on a CPU (e.g. via I2C or SPI or UART). Vivado is the tool you need to program the hardware, and you define your hardware in e.g. Verilog or VHDL (which kind of look like a program, but this is very misleading).

If you never did something like that before (or worked with e.g. the programmable hardware in a Cypress PSoC), then a FPGA roadtest will have a steep learning curve. It could be better to look at the CPLDs from Xilinx (e.g. you can get rather cheap boards with the XC9572XL), which are programmed by Xilinx ISE. And there you can also define your hardware as a schematic which might be easier to understand at the beginning.

FPGA are not the kind of devices you program in software. They are no CPUs or MCUs. These are devices where you can create the hardware you need, and then it interacts with the software on a CPU (e.g. via I2C or SPI or UART). Vivado is the tool you need to program the hardware, and you define your hardware in e.g. Verilog or VHDL (which kind of look like a program, but this is very misleading).

If you never did something like that before (or worked with e.g. the programmable hardware in a Cypress PSoC), then a FPGA roadtest will have a steep learning curve. It could be better to look at the CPLDs from Xilinx (e.g. you can get rather cheap boards with the XC9572XL), which are programmed by Xilinx ISE. And there you can also define your hardware as a schematic which might be easier to understand at the beginning.

hlipka  wrote:

 

FPGA are not the kind of devices you program in software.

Ha ha - so now we get into a deep, philosophical argument about what "software" is ... !!

It is "software" in the sense that you write "source code" in a "language" (eg, VHDL) which gets "compiled" and then loaded into the FPGA to define its operation.

But it is nothing like the kind of software you write to run on a processor.

It is not a sequence of instructions that a processor follows, one after the other; rather, it is a definition of the hardware itself.

You could actually create a processor in the FPGA, and then have that processor run "conventional" software that you write for it...

As already noted, this particular FPGA also has an actual microprocessor ready-made and built-in.