Zynq UltraScale+ drone control

The official term is unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), apparently, which is a bit of a mouthful, so we prefer to say drone. In any case, we developed a controller for a UAV (drone) for a customer using a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ SoC, whose CPUs implement the position control as well as tracking of the flight trajectory. The sensors and actors are attached through the FPGA logic; the number and type of these interfaces vary greatly with the type of controlled vehicle, so all of these interfaces are dynamically configurable.

The controller also supports redundancy, by having two parallel flight calculator units supervising each other. Should the currently active calculator fail, the reserve unit takes over all tasks autonomously. Aside flight control functions, the controller prepares and compresses a Full-HD video signal (HD-SDI) from a camera for transmission over radio.

Click through to read more about some of our customer projects.

The first SO-DIMM Zynq UltraScale+ Module has landed

We just received the eagerly expected Mars XU3 module. Rejoice guys, because the Mars XU3 module offers really cool features on a very tiny space! It's built around the brand new Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ and offers up to 154,000 systems logic cells, 108 user I/Os, 6 ARM® processors, a GPU, up to 4 GByte of ultra-fast DDR4 SDRAM, 64 MByte QSPI flash memory, 16 GByte eMMC flash memory and Gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0/3.0 ports.

Sounds interesting huh? Click through for more information!

Ultra fast SoC design with Visual System Integrator

Visual System Integrator, from System View is a graphical extension to the Xilinx® Vivado® suite for the development of complex embedded systems. The tool supports most Xilinx FPGAs and SoCs, as well as Windows and embedded Linux. After rendering the hardware platform setup, the tool automatically generates the needed interconnects: PCIe, AXI-MM, AXI-Stream, Ethernet and Aurora interfaces are all supported.

The first official release of VSI is available now for evaluation – a quick search online will lead you to a few videos showing the graphical user interface and example applications in action. The graphical user interface the system designer, to drag-and-drop functional blocks between CPUs and FPGAs, and generate the new bitstreams and binaries with just a few clicks.

Click through to read more about this powerful tool!

Free seminar: Getting started with Xilinx Zynq SoC

Enclustra and Avnet SILICA are arranging a free seminar on the SoC design integration.

Don’t miss how engineers from Avnet SILICA and Enclustra illustrate how you can utilize the full performance of a SoC, even with minimal VHDL and FPGA know-how. If you’re working with microcontrollers, DSPs, SoCs and FPGAs – you should join us! Learn for which applications SoCs are good for, how you can shorten your development time, which tools are required and many more interesting things.

Eager to learn? Klick on the link below and sign up for the seminar on April 26^th.

See you there!

Incredible floating point performance, incredible price

The Mercury+ AA1 SoC module, based on the Intel Arria 10 SoC, offers up to 480,000 system logic cells and an extremely juicy amount of performance at a very tasty price point. In addition to its integrated dual-core ARM processor, the module offers up to 286 user I/Os, and 12 multi-gigabit transceivers each offer a data transfer rate of up to 12.5 Gbps. Interfaces for USB 3.0, PCIe Gen3 ×4/Gen2 ×8 and Gigabit Ethernet make the module suitable for almost all applications. Its fast DDR4 SDRAM with a bandwidth of 9.6 GByte/sec and ECC also means that it's well suited for application that require the utmost data integrity.

Click through to learn more.