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How to begin development on SOC (xilinx)

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tajiknomi

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​I don't know whether it is the right place for posting such question or not.

This question is opinion based so feel free to share your experience.

Background:

I had a year experience programming in C, had worked on micro-controllers like PIC for a little time and now working on nvidia-cards for parallelizing​ some of my algorithms.
Before posting this question, i had already searched such kind of questions and i realized that the above experience will not help me out in exploring FPGA.

Reason for development on xilinx SOC:

The company for which i'm currently working wants me to, because they have some projects in mind which they think would be better suited for SOC/FPGA.

What i need to know:

1) Apart from learning Digital logic design, languages like (VHDL/VERILOG), Architecture; what other domain(s) should i be familiar with if i had to start simple projects on SOC?

2) I would like to purchase a xilinx​ cheap development board for starting purposes, any advice on which one would be better for a complete noob ?

3) Are there any book(s) which is based on a xilinx​ SOC development board so that it is easy for me to get started, like a step-by-step intro to how to write "a good Hello World exercise" on SOC,for example.​

4) Any recommended books ?​
 

1. Depending upon the simu, synth & PnR tools you are using, TCL can become handy.

2. The cost of a Xilinx FPGA based dev board will depend on the available on-board peripherals and ext memory. And the choice of peripherals on the dev board will depend on what you want to implement.
Prices vary from about $80 to more than $1000. I think for simple projects, go for an ARM SoC based Xilinx 7-series FPGA board with USB, Ethernet(if you need it) and some IO pins. I think you should not spend more than $80 for a simple board with a few on-board LEDs, DIP switches, IO pins.
Have a look at the various Zedboards @ http://zedboard.org/

3. I will let others comment on this.
 

You could also look at Cora Z7 board from Digilent - it's $99 and some pins are accessible over Pmod and Arduino like sheilds. The hardware itself is important but also docs provided by the pcb manufacturer and some examples might be useful as well.
 

tajiknomi said:
​1) Apart from learning Digital logic design, languages like (VHDL/VERILOG), Architecture; what other domain(s) should i be familiar with if i had to start simple projects on SOC?​
Click to expand...


You should also understand things like how to deal with metastability in multi-clock designs, the AXI4 bus if you are designing a custom peripheral (which it looks like the plan).

Besides those things, don't ever forget you are writing VHDL/Verilog that represents hardware, so don't just jump in using for loops, arrays, and in line programming techniques...they don't translate to hardware in the same way as software.​
 

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