Why FPGA will become the mainstream choice for embedded system design

With the continuous development of consumer electronics, Internet of Things and other fields, user needs are becoming more and more complex and diverse. Therefore, we must choose a suitable processor (SoC) system in the design of embedded systems. Of course, we also need to consider cost and functionality. In terms of power consumption, performance, I/O resources, etc., FPGAs have increasingly become the mainstream choice for embedded system design with the increase of practical cases.

Why FPGA will become the mainstream choice for embedded system design

As the industry leader in programmable logic devices (FPGA), Xilinx provides a wealth of devices and simple development tools. The following will introduce you from the following aspects:

FPGA/SoC: The earliest we all adopted pure FPGA design, using FPGA resources to implement soft core processors such as Microblaze, Picoblaze, etc. Now Xilinx has launched the Zynq SoC and Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC series, which integrate hard core processors ( Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU or Quad-A53+Dual-R5 GPU), which not only brings improvements in performance, power consumption, and cost-effectiveness, but also reduces PCB size;

Power consumption: The Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC series has indeed been greatly improved on the basis of the previous pure FPGA devices. It supports multiple power modes: Full-Power mode; Low-Power mode; Sleep mode, DRAM pause; Power-Off Mode, provide rich and flexible power management solutions, flexible switching between performance and power consumption;

Analog quantity processing: As early as the Virtex series, the ADC function was integrated, but this is only limited to monitoring the internal analog quantity of the device, such as voltage, temperature, etc. After that, two 1Msamples/sec@12-bits ADC modules were integrated on the 7 series to support the acquisition of internal and external analog quantities. Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC integrated higher performance ADCs/DACs modules: 4Gsamples/sec@12 bits ADCs / 6.5Gsamples/sec@14 bits DACs, can be applied to 15G, radar and other fields.

Security: We all know the bitstream format of FPGA startup files. Both Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC and Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC support encrypted bitstreams, which are loaded into the processor for secure decryption and startup.

Development tools: For engineers, the most important thing is development tools. Easy-to-use development tools can get twice the result with half the effort. The Vivado tool, which was launched at the same time as the Xilinx Zynq 7000 series, integrates rich functions: IP integrator (IPI) is a graphical IP design plug-in; HLS (High Level Synthesis) supports engineers to use C/C++ language to generate HDL Function code. In addition, SDSoC is a complete system, software, and hardware design tool that supports the development of embedded system software and hardware functions using C/C++ language. SDAccel is a design tool based on the OpenCL development framework.

This shows that FPGA/SoC vendors have spent a lot of energy to optimize devices and improve development tools to make them easier to apply to embedded system design. At the same time, our learning process will be easier than in the past. In the near future FPGA/SoC will be more widely used.

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