Continue to Site

Welcome to EDAboard.com

Welcome to our site! EDAboard.com is an international Electronics Discussion Forum focused on EDA software, circuits, schematics, books, theory, papers, asic, pld, 8051, DSP, Network, RF, Analog Design, PCB, Service Manuals... and a whole lot more! To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Register Log in

What is an all programmable SoC?

Status
Not open for further replies.
F

forkconfig

Member level 1
Joined
Jan 28, 2013
Messages
32
Helped
0
Reputation
0
Reaction score
0
Trophy points
1,286
Activity points
1,655
Help choosing an FPGA

Hello,

I am looking to purchase an FPGA kit, but I was hoping to get some information first.
What is an "all programmable SoC"?
In specific, I was wondering if you could please explain how the Zynq 7000 differs from a regular FPGA (such as the Spartan-6) from a development point of view? I want to take advantage of the ARM cores, but sometimes I want to just treat it as if it's a regular old FPGA. Would it be more challenging to do this with the Zynq 7000?

Thanks
 
Last edited:

you can treat it however you like - regular FPGA (with wasted arm cores) or one with an arm core in it. The benefit of hard cores is it will make data treansfer between ARM and FPGA much easier and much faster.
 

I don't think that answers my questions:

1) What is an "all programmable SoC"?

2) In specific, I was wondering if you could please explain how the Zynq 7000 differs from a regular FPGA (such as the Spartan-6) from a development point of view?

3) I want to take advantage of the ARM cores, but sometimes I want to just treat it as if it's a regular old FPGA. Would it be more challenging to do this with the Zynq 7000?
 

1) just a fancy way of implying that you can put your uP, FPGA, ADC in one package and it's programmable.

2) It has a hard ARM core inside that can boot independently from the FPGA fabric.

3) You could treat it as either an extremely expensive ARM processor or as a rather pricey generic FPGA. The tool chain is the same for implementation on the backend place and route. Only the frontend tool chain differs when you have the ARM core used in a design. This is equivalent to the old Power PC in Virtex 4, which I used. We implemented a uP system in system builder and instantiated the system in the RTL that had all the FPGAcentric stuff.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

Part and Inventory Search

Welcome to EDABoard.com

Sponsor

Back
Top