Ideas for doing Bachelor/Master thesis project with the ZYNQ device – 1

I was thinking of ideas for students to do their bachelor or master degree thesis with the Xilinx ZYNQ device. Development of A Windows CE BSP for the ZYNQ: Currently, there is a company, Adeneo which is providing a board support package (BSP) for the ZYNQ. This is however not coming free. In my idea it would be very useful to assess the possibility of creating a BSP for the ZYNQ device using what Microsoft and Xilinx provide as free material. Later this BSP can be provided to all other people for free and even enhanced versions can be sold…
Continue Reading »

Ideas for doing Embedded FPGA design Projects – Color LED Panel

Wherever you need a large number of I/Os in your design, FPGAs can be a suitable option.  The idea here is to build Color LED Panels controlled by FPGAs. The LED Panel itself should be built with high-powr color LEDS. The controller can be implemented on the FPGA. The controller should provide suitable interfaces to the user. For example, the set of photos which the user wants to show on the LED Panel screen should be stored as image files on the SD card connect to the FPGA. Your embedded design on the FPGA will read the SD card, will…
Continue Reading »

Ideas for Projects on Embedded FPGA design – 1

Many students write me regarding possible ideas to do projects using FPGAs.  Here based on my experience in recent years and based on what I see more important, I list a set of ideas which can be considered as suitable and useful targets for doing projects on the Embedded FPGA design topic. First things first! Connectivity! Suppose that you have implemented a computational unit on the FPGA. The first question which raises is how do you connect this guy to the rest of the system so that you can use it efficiently? In fact, most of the times we have…
Continue Reading »

Hetergeneous Multi-Core OpenRISC Cluster on Xilinx ZYNQ

During my final months of my stay in the ERC Multi-therman laborary in University of Bologna, I have implemented a heterogeneous computing platform using the Xilinx ZYNQ device. The platform is built mainly for the Xilinx XC7Z045 ZYNQ device. As of its current state, the platform contains two clusters on the PL connected to the ARM cores inside the ZYNQ-PS.  Each cluster contains 4 OpenRISC 1000 cores.
Continue Reading »