In this series of 23 YouTube videos [Rich] puts the AMD Zynq-7000 SoC through its paces by building a development board from the ground up to host it along with its peripherals. The Zynq is part FPGA and part CPU, and while it has been around for a while, we don’t see nearly as many projects about it as we’d like.
[Rich] covers everything from the power system to HDMI, USB, DDR RAM, and everything in between. By the end, he’s able to boot PetaLinux.
The Zynq SoC includes an ARM Cortex-A9 Based APU and an Artix-7 FPGA. In case you missed it, Xilinx was recently acquired by AMD, which is why you might have remembered this as a Xilinx part.
We’ve heard from [Rich] before. Back in 2021 we saw his Arduino Brings USB Mouse To Homebrew Computer. Don’t miss his follow-up playlist: Building on my Zynq-7000 in which he takes his Zynq-7000 board even further.
If you’re interested in FPGA technology but need something more easy going to get you started, be sure to check out how to build a 6809 CPU on an FPGA. Or, if you need something even simpler, report for boot camp.
Thanks to [Alex] for the tip!
I would like to make an FPGA board as well but sadly I do not have anything in mind that would require an FPGA
flash an LED!
Everyone benefits from a personnel phased array radar in the back yard.
Same problem. Where do you need to transform a massive flow of data? I can think of image processing.
But PC with OpenCV can do a lot easily, even if it’s slow to start, power hungry and skipping frames.
I think I ranter have a 32bit micro with 2GB of ram.
But why do this when we already have the super practical Red Pitaya board ?!
There is an awesome sense of achievement and great educational value in successfully building something like this by yourself, from the ground up.
The point of this was not just to build yet another dev board, but to enjoy the process and learn from the experience and pass on the knowledge, including all lessons learned, to the viewers with enough interest to watch all the videos in the series.
FPGAs are great until you decide to open Vitis. HLS is quite hard to wrap my head around, especially using AXI between the ARM core and FPGA fabric. Verilog is fine, and Vivado is painful but at least works. I wish there were better sources of documentation for programming in HLS or Verilog, as AMD’s docs are clearly not for beginners. I’m taking a class on FPGAs right now, certainly doesn’t help that the teacher doesn’t seem to understand how to use the tooling either (nor how to write C but I digress). Also I wish there was more FOSS tooling around FPGAs, as Id give anything to be able to replace Vivado/Vitis with a text editor (nvim) and some command line tools.