Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the history behind the FPGA technology and how disruptive it has been to the electronics industry. We looked at the specific hardware features of modern FPGAs, how to choose one for a specific application based on its design architectural needs, and how to select an FPGA based on the Xilinx market offering.

Then, we looked at the history behind using SoCs for FPGAs and how they’ve evolved in the last two decades. We looked at the MicroBlaze, PowerPC 405, and PowerPC 440-based embedded system offerings from Xilinx and when they switched to using ARM processors in FPGAs. Then, we focused on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC family, which is built around a PS using a Cortex-A9 CPU cluster. We enumerated its main hardware features within the PS and how it is intended to augment them using FPGA logic to perform hardware acceleration, for example. We also looked at the latest generic Xilinx SoC for FPGA and, specifically, the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, which comes with a powerful quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU cluster that’s combined in the same PS with a dual-core Cortex-R5F CPU cluster, a flexible interconnect, and a rich set of hardware blocks. This can help provide a good start for many modern and demanding SoC architectures.

Finally, we introduced SoCs for ASICs and how different they are from the SoCs in FPGAs in terms of their design, the associated costs, and the opportunities for each. We also introduced the SoCs in ASICs design flow. Following on from this, in the next chapter, we will introduce the Xilinx SoCs design flow and its associated tools.