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 hardware security features

As for any modern embedded system, connected to the internet or not, security is becoming a major design challenge, specifically in today’s emerging Internet of Things (IoT) devices and modules. FPGA-based SoCs face the same security challenges and will need to be designed to counter illegal access and tampering. Xilinx FPGA SoCs adopt the ARM TrustZone security architecture for both the Processing Subsystem (PS) and Programmable Logic (PL) parts. The ARM TrustZone architecture is a combination of hardware and software frameworks that work in tandem to make the SoC implementing them as secure as possible. In addition to the ARM TrustZone support, Xilinx SoCs add a third dimension to the security paradigm, specifically for the PL, which requires an externally hosted configuration bitstream file. The configuration bitstream can be encrypted by the Xilinx hardware design tools; the FPGA device provides the mechanism for its decryption by the...