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Posts Tagged ‘university’

Zynq-based Embedded Development Kit for University Programs

Tuesday, October 17th, 2017

Creativity and innovation, which lead the society to success, rest on the foundational institutions such as schools and universities. They provide fertile soil to seed, grow and flourish enterprises. To harvest more within an industry, the ecosystem needs to be enriched where the seeds are grown. Considering that the university’s courses are the nutrition to student, they need to be designed in a productive manner as they will provide the next generation of engineers. By providing the necessary platform in addition to the rich and informative tutorials, the quality of the input information for students would be assured. Particularly in the field of Electrical and Computer Engineering, it is important that students get as much hands on experience as possible, and tackle design challenges – such as HW/SW co-design and co-verification – before entering the job market; for their own benefit as well as the industry as a whole.

In this blog, you will become familiar with the TySOM Education kit (TySOM EDU) package designed for the university courses related to hardware design and embedded system design researches.

The TySOM EDU contains a TySOM embedded development board, Riviera-PRO advanced hardware simulator and informative tutorials and reference designs. Although it is possible to choose any development board from the TySOM embedded development board family, the TySOM-1A-7Z010 would be the most cost-effective solution for most university projects.

TySOM-1A-7Z010 (ZynqTM) is a ready-to-use and feature-rich embedded development board which provides the required peripherals to tackle both basic and advanced Zynq-based projects. The XC7Z010 is based on the Xilinx® All Programmable System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture, which integrates a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Xilinx 7-series Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) logic. Coupling the device to a rich set of peripherals for connectivity, communication and multimedia, makes this board ideal for university projects requiring HW/SW co-design.  For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog.

Synthesis of Energy-Efficient FSMs Implemented in PLD Circuits

Tuesday, September 26th, 2017

Well, summer has been and gone; and for most of us it was a time to relax and reflect on our working practices. What can we do to achieve better results? And what can we do to break out of the routine of working on so many revisions?

For me, one of my summer break ponderings was thinking back on a trick I learned while working with my colleagues at the Silesian University of Technology.

CMOS technology is the one that has dominated all applications of digital circuits. Power consumed by a CMOS digital circuit is the sum of two components: static power and dynamic power. The static power is a characteristic feature of the technology process used, and is associated with leakage currents in steady state. The dynamic power consumed by a CMOS gate is proportional to average switching activity at the output of the gate, which describes how often the state at the gate output is changing. The dynamic power component can thus be considered and minimized in the appropriate process of logic synthesis.

The essence of logic synthesis oriented toward energy-efficiency requires finding a circuit structure in which the number of state transitions is minimized.

Switching global clock networks are responsible for a significant part of the total power dissipated by a CMOS VLSI circuit. That’s why many engineers try to block the clock signal to achieve power reductions in synchronous circuits.

Programmable Logic Devices (PLDs), and especially Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), constitute a relatively new and rapidly developing branch of digital electronics. Constantly growing logic capacities at moderate prices make PLDs an attractive platform for not only prototyping but also short- and medium-volume production.

It is not always obvious though how best to map logic structures (resources) within a given PLD architecture when designing with energy-efficiency in mind. In particular, implementing clock gating is difficult, as PLD circuits contain dedicated clock networks, which do not contain any gating elements. “Disabling” the clock signal in PLD structures can be accomplished in two ways: firstly, by utilizing the “Enable Clock” inputs of memory elements or, secondly, by distributing the clock signal using local clock lines or general-purpose routing resources (which enable the insertion of logic gates). For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog.

 

Reprogrammable, reprogrammable, reprogrammable: What’s great about FPGAs!

Friday, January 22nd, 2016

I-loveFPGAsI like FPGAs. My first experience with an FPGA was my university final year project where I demonstrated BIST with four Xilinx© 3000 devices; this was before FPGAs had JTAG built in. Filling up these devices with ViewDraw schematics required many hours in front of a terminal.   Fast track to today’s advances such as Xilinx UltraScale and Vivado HLx, and I hope you would agree things have moved on quite a bit.

 

Amid all this changes, however, there are some things that have remained constant. Those are the three things that are great about FPGAs: they are reprogrammable, reprogrammable, and, they are reprogrammable!

So how is this capability utilized? Here are three examples:

 

Electronic products using FPGAs:

I think it is important not look at FPGAs as some poor cousin of an ASIC. This view is from the days of LSI Logic and Xilinx marketing battles, when FPGAs were used for mopping up “glue logic”. Today an FPGA provides a massively parallel programmable digital platform with a lot of silicon IP, such as high-performance interfaces. This capability is widely used by many industries now; it is not solely driven by the volume of parts. Today, you even find FPGAs in consumer products.

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90’s Kid Active-HDL Celebrates Sweet 16

Wednesday, August 28th, 2013

As the proud Product Manager of Aldec’s  FPGA Design Simulation solution,  I am excited (like it was my first Cranberries concert) to announce that Active-HDL™ is celebrating 16 years since its initial release in 1997. Active-HDL has not merely stood the test of time, it has dominated the FPGA market like a Hulk Hogan smackdown with powerful simulation performance and debugging tools.

The key to Active-HDL’s long-term success lies in Aldec’s customer-centric philosophy. Simply put, we really do listen closely to our users and invest heavily in our tools. For this reason, continued simulation performance optimizations from release to release enable users to benefit from Active-HDL’s faster simulation even as the size of FPGA designs continues to grow.

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