The Linux FPGA

It was never unusual to have a CPU and an FPGA together. After all, each has different strengths and weaknesses. However, newer devices like the Xilinx Zynq have both a CPU and an FPGA in the same package. That means your design has to span hardware, FPGA configurations, and software. [Mitchell Orsucci] was using a Zynq device on a ArtyZ7-20 board and decided he wanted to use Linux to operate the ARM processor and provide user-space tools to interface with the FPGA and reconfigure it dynamically.

This sounds like a big project and it certainly isn’t trivial by any means. However, the Xilinx tools do a lot of the heavy lifting, including setting up the Linux kernel and a suitable root file system. The bulk of [Mitchell’s] work was in developing user space tools for Linux programs to interact with the FPGA hardware. You can see a short video demo below.

The design exposes an I2C interface, an SPI interface, a PWM controller, and 10 digital I/O pins to the Linux side. Both the schematics and the source code are on GitHub.

We’ve seen the Zynq do everything from synthesizing music to power astrophotography cameras. While it is a lot of work to build software and hardware together, the results are worth it and the tools will help.

Filed under: ARM, FPGA, linux hacks

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