The Avnet ZUBoard 1CG: The Swiss Military Knife of Improvement Boards

It’s uncommon to discover a improvement 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 throughout 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 supplies, and the strategies of creating options.

The SoC

Though it’s throughout the Price Optimized vary, the AMD Zynq™ UltraScale™ XCZU1CG MPSoC continues to be an exceptionally succesful gadget. It supplies builders with twin core Arm® Cortex®-A53 64-bit processors throughout the software processing unit (APU). Every of the Arm® Cortex®-A53 processors additionally comprises a NEON unit. The NEON unit permits Single Instruction A number of Information operations to be carried out utilizing each floating and integer operations for vector processing purposes. This help for SIMD makes the A53 processors throughout 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 subject arithmetic, which help elliptic curve cryptography.

The Arm Cortex-A53 processors are coupled with twin core Arm® Cortex®-R5 processors. These processors are throughout the real-time unit and meant for real-time purposes that help requirements akin to IEC61508 or ISO26262. To help this, the R5 processors run in lock step and the tightly coupled reminiscences 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 offered.

Along with the APU and RPU, quite a lot of peripherals are offered throughout the processing system. These vary from high-speed interfaces, akin 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 could be chosen due to 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 supplies programmable logic. A number of high-speed Arm® eXtensible Interface (AXI) connections allow the processor’s handle area to trade information between the PS and PL, and the processing system packages the programmable logic.

The board and energy

The ZUBoard 1CG is a compact improvement board that operates from a USB-C energy provide at 15 volts. The ability system generates the rails needed 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 consumer 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 could be anticipated, the ZUBoard 1CG supplies builders with a spread of reminiscence and interface options.

The board supplies 256Mb of QSPI reminiscence. It additionally has a micro-SD card slot, the place these reminiscences can be utilized because the supply of the boot recordsdata for the consumer software. To run the working system and retailer software information, the board additionally supplies 1GB of LPDDR4 reminiscence. Whereas that is linked 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 needed).

In relation to interfacing the ZUBoard 1CG, the board supplies a spread of normal interfaces which can be seen on most improvement environments. These embrace 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 offered by the high-speed enlargement interfaces. These enlargement 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 degree 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 gadgets, akin to eMMC, for use on enlargement boards.

These high-speed enlargement ports are linked to a spread of peripherals from twin cameras to eMMC and Show Port outputs. There are additionally a variety of third-party excessive pace suitable boards that present ADC and DAC interfacing capabilities

Together with the high-speed interfacing resolution, the ZUBoard 1CG additionally supplies a MIKROE Click on website. This Click on website helps the large ecosystem of boards offered 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 supplies builders with strain and temperature sensors situated onboard.

Creating options

In relation to creating options for the ZUBoard 1CG, we use a number of purposes from AMD. These embrace:

• 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 steel 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 gadgets.
• AMD PYNQ™ Framework – Gives a Python-based framework to allow management and information trade 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 steel 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 offered by programmable logic.

To provide some thought of how highly effective the ZUBoard 1CG is, we will take a look at its capabilities for accelerating features from the processing system to the programmable logic. This makes use of a design created throughout the AMD Vivado Design Suite software program to implement a Quick Fourier Remodel, a standard characteristic of many sign processing algorithms. We are able to 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 scale 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.

Nevertheless, it isn’t 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 ideal worth level.

If you wish to get began with the ZUBoard 1CG, take a look at the tasks and blogs beneath.

AMD, and the AMD Arrow brand, PYNQ, UltraScale+, Vivado, Vitis, Zynq and combos thereof are emblems of Superior Micro Units, Inc.