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 Complex Software with an Embedded Operating System Flow

In this chapter, you will learn about embedded operating system flows and discover the tools used to build a complex software application to run on an FPGA SoC. You will use the design tools available to create the SoC board support package (BSP) for the desired embedded operating system – in this case, FreeRTOS. You will go through the process of generating the SoC bootloader, which runs when the SoC is powered up and launches the embedded software. This chapter is also hands-on, so you will be guided through every step of the design process. Here, you will go through all the embedded software development phases, starting from the initial concept, followed by the actual software building, and then running it on a hardware board or a virtual platform.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following topics:

  • Embedded OS software design flow for Xilinx FPGA-based SoCs
  • Customizing and generating...