For RoadTesters: MiniZed Dev Board Tutorial -- Creating a Zynq Hardware Platform in Vivado

With a traditional processor, the hardware platform is pre-defined. The manufacturer selected the processor parameters and built-in peripherals when the chip was designed. To make use of this pre-defined processor, you need only target that specific hardware platform in the software development tools.

The Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC is different.

Zynq provides multiple building blocks and leaves the definition to you as the design engineer. This adds flexibility, but it also means that a bit of work needs to be done up front before any software development can take place.

The first step in completing a Zynq design is to define and build the hardware platform. The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to quickly and easily create a base hardware platform for MiniZed.

Objectives

When this tutorial is complete, you will be able to:
Create a new project in Vivado, targeting MiniZed
Create a block based design to insert an ARM processor core
Import the MiniZed Zynq PS Preset settings
Build and export the hardware platform

Download the attached pdf to read through the tutorial.

Attachments:

01_MiniZed_Zynq_Intro_2017_1_01.pdf

Top Comments

alvieboy over 7 years ago

It would be interesting to see how it stands in comparison to my Parallella board (and the original ZedBoard, which I also have).

Alvie
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Jan Cumps over 7 years ago in reply to DAB

DAB, while the Cypress ones have ready-to-use high level components (analog and digital) that are comparable with separate ICs, this onge is more “arm cpu directly bussed into FPGA fabric”.

powerful but difficult for me. I’d love to become more skilled but it’s a rough learning ramp for me.
It must be great to be fluent with these devices. And that’s still my aim ...
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hlipka over 7 years ago in reply to balearicdynamics

From the experience - a PSoC is much easier to program and develop for. It also comes with more refined and ready-made components. OTOH the Zynq is much more powerfull, since it can actually run Linux, and having a FPGA means you have much more capacity for designs.
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DAB over 7 years ago

From reading the tutorial, it almost looks like it is easy enough for me to follow.

It would be interesting to compare its capability with a Cypress Semiconductor PSOC.

DAB
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balearicdynamics over 7 years ago

I read the tutorial almost in detail. My impression is that the class of product is very similar to the PSoC family with a couple of details that makes the difference; the first is that is seems more flexible and complete and the second is that it includes a larger series of hardware implementation options. Having already worked (and working again too) with Cypress PSoC products family this seems the next evolution step. I am curious to see what happens in practice with the development system: easy to use, flexibility and what else. As there are a lot of more possibilities also the number and variety of "blocks" to build hardware design dramatically increase; it will be interesting to see the general complexity level approaching this series of boards.

Enrico
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Jan Cumps over 7 years ago

It's not explicitly stated in the intro, but it's an ARM and an FPGA on the same silicon. Exciting ...
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rscasny over 7 years ago

I will be launching the MiniZed Dev Board Roadtest soon. If you are interested in applying for this RoadTest, I encourage you to look over this tutorial that was produced by AVNET.

If you have questions, send them my way. rscasny
Randall Scasny
RoadTest Program Manager
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