What is an all programmable SoC?

[forkconfig]

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

 

[TrickyDicky]

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.

 

[forkconfig]

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?

 

[ads_ee]

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.