Book Image

Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17

By : Maya Posch
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17

5 (1)
By: Maya Posch

Overview of this book

C++ is a great choice for embedded development, most notably, because it does not add any bloat, extends maintainability, and offers many advantages over different programming languages. Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17 will show you how C++ can be used to build robust and concurrent systems that leverage the available hardware resources. Starting with a primer on embedded programming and the latest features of C++17, the book takes you through various facets of good programming. You’ll learn how to use the concurrency, memory management, and functional programming features of C++ to build embedded systems. You will understand how to integrate your systems with external peripherals and efficient ways of working with drivers. This book will also guide you in testing and optimizing code for better performance and implementing useful design patterns. As an additional benefit, you will see how to work with Qt, the popular GUI library used for building embedded systems. By the end of the book, you will have gained the confidence to use C++ for embedded programming.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Hybrid FPGA/SoC chips


Although systems that include both an FPGA and SoC have been very common for years, a more recent addition has been hybrid FPGA/SoC chips, which include the dies for both an FPGA and an SoC (usually ARM based) in the same package. These are then linked together with a bus so that both can efficiently communicate with each other using memory-mapped I/O and similar.

Common examples of such FPGAs currently include Altera (now Intel), Cyclone V SoC, and Xilinx Zynq. The Cyclone V SoC's block diagram from the official datasheet gives a good overview of how such a system works:

Here, we can see that there are a number of ways that the Hard Processor System (HPS) and FPGA sides can communicate with each other, such as via a shared SDRAM controller, two point-to-point links, and a number of other interfaces. For the Cyclone V SoC, either the FPGA or SoC side can be the first side that boots when the system starts, allowing for a wide range of system configuration options.