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

Legacy off-chip interconnects overview

Connecting devices together using off-chip buses and interfaces is necessary to construct an electronics system made up of many integrated circuits (ICs). The need to use these buses is to satisfy the requirements of these ICs to exchange data as they collaborate to implement a more complex function in comparison to what they can achieve on their own. The electronics industry has seen the emergence of many standards and protocols to address this need, and the choice of using a specific protocol depends on many factors, such as the physical IO standards, the speed that these buses can run at, the implementation cost, the versatility of the protocol in the industry, the throughput that they can provide, and so on. We distinguish between two main categories of buses in legacy and modern systems: the protocols suited to carry control data and signaling between devices, and the buses that carry high-throughput payload data at a relatively high speed...