Xilinx Developer Forum

[Steve Haynal]

Hi Group,

This week as part of my day job I attended the Xilinx Developer Forum. For my day job I work at Mentor Graphics, Siemens, on tools and infrastructure for IC makers to prototype their designs on FPGAs before spending large amounts of money and committing to silicon. Our prototyping systems use 10s of the largest Xilinx FPGAs and cost more than my house. 

There were several talks and exhibits on the RFSoCs. Since they combine the FPGA and ADC/DAC in the same package, they have very high bandwidth and no user worry for the FPGA ADC/DAC interconnect. Some of the variants have 8 ADCs each capable of 4Gsps. They could make an incredible amateur radio, but unfortunately are very pricey. I keep hoping the price will come down or a stripped down variant will be offered, but that doesn't appear to be in Xilinx's plans.

One other interesting topic was pynq. I used the predecessor to jupyter notebooks in a past project and really liked being able to mix documentation, python code and GUI widgets in a single webpage. I heard that all CS students at Berkeley are now required to use jupyter to document their work. It is part of the movement for repeatable research in CS where the document can actually be executed to reproduce the results. I would love to see pynq ported to one of the cheaper Zynq platforms such as the z-turn lite and a companion radio card developed. Pynq would reduce the development overhead. Vivado board diagrams would allow those who don't know RTL to stay away from RTL. A development card would free us from having to include that in the manufacturing of a product. A companion card for something like the z-turn lite would be interesting for MyIR to manufacture and sell.

73,

Steve

kf7o

[Dani]

That sounds great, I ordered for the school I work 5 zynq-z1 samples some time ago.

Now I just need to learn how to write Code, lol.