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

DSP techniques using FPGAs

Performing DSP in an FPGA or an SoC-based FPGA, such as the Zynq-7000 SoC or the UltraScale+ MPSoC, is no different than performing it in an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) specifically built for such operations. There are many advantages to performing DSP operations in an FPGA technology in comparison to using an ASIC and these are mostly due to the flexibility, extensibility, and scaling advantages of using an FPGA-based DSP solution. Classically, FPGAs were chosen to implement DSP computation units for many industries, telecommunication being one of the dominant ones. Wireless communication standards were still evolving and the time to market was, and is still, an important business objective, making using a flexible solution, such as FPGA-based DSP, an attractive option. In these applications, most of the time, the FPGA device was a companion chip to a powerful processor. The architecture of these solutions evolved around reconfigurability...