Book Image

Architecting and Building High-Speed SoCs

By : Mounir Maaref
5 (1)
Book Image

Architecting and Building High-Speed SoCs

5 (1)
By: Mounir Maaref

Overview of this book

Modern and complex SoCs can adapt to many demanding system requirements by combining the processing power of ARM processors and the feature-rich Xilinx FPGAs. You’ll need to understand many protocols, use a variety of internal and external interfaces, pinpoint the bottlenecks, and define the architecture of an SoC in an FPGA to produce a superior solution in a timely and cost-efficient manner. This book adopts a practical approach to helping you master both the hardware and software design flows, understand key interconnects and interfaces, analyze the system performance and enhance it using the acceleration techniques, and finally build an RTOS-based software application for an advanced SoC design. You’ll start with an introduction to the FPGA SoCs technology fundamentals and their associated development design tools. Gradually, the book will guide you through building the SoC hardware and software, starting from the architecture definition to testing on a demo board or a virtual platform. The level of complexity evolves as the book progresses and covers advanced applications such as communications, security, and coherent hardware acceleration. By the end of this book, you'll have learned the concepts underlying FPGA SoCs’ advanced features and you’ll have constructed a high-speed SoC targeting a high-end FPGA from the ground up.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: Fundamentals and the Main Features of High-Speed SoC and FPGA Designs
7
Part 2: Implementing High-Speed SoC Designs in an FPGA
12
Part 3: Implementation and Integration of Advanced High-Speed FPGA SoCs

FPGA SoC Software Design Flow

In this chapter, we will delve into the implementation phase of the SoC software of the Electronic Trading System (ETS) for which we developed the architecture in Chapter 6, What Goes Where in a High-Speed SoC Design, and built the hardware in Chapter 7, FPGA SoC Hardware Design and Verification Flow, FPGA SoC Hardware Design and Verification Flow. We will define the SoC software microarchitecture for both the Cortex-A9 processor and its accelerator, the MicroBlaze Packet Processor (PP). We will explore the embedded software development flow using the Xilinx Vitis environment and how to write simple software to run on the SoC processors. We will mainly use the Vitis IDE-generated test application source code for the peripherals included in the design to understand how to configure, access, and then use them. This exercise will prepare you to write more complex software applications for the ETS SoC design in Part 3. This chapter is mainly hands-on and you...