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

Building a secure FPGA-based SoC

As already introduced, the Zynq-7000 SoC FPGA adopts the ARM TrustZone framework and provides a secure boot mechanism with a root of trust using the BootROM. It can store its public encryption and authentication keys in the eFuse provided by the FPGA, as well as use the AES and HMAC hardware engines available within the PL to be used by the PS as hard macros before the FPGA logic is even configured. The PS can securely communicate with these hard macros through the PCAP interface to accelerate the boot time process. Through the PCAP interface, the PS can decrypt, authenticate, and load the FSBL and the FPGA bitstream. These protected images are stored externally. Then, they are loaded, decrypted, and authenticated by the PS through the PCAP and then stored within the PS OCM memory to be used by the FSBL to configure the FPGA logic and continue loading the necessary firmware images needed by the SoC software. The Xilinx AXI IP peripherals also adopt...