3 ms·

It's a subject I know very little about, would anyone care to enlighten me on some good use cases for this kind of hardware?

• rwmj 7y ago
  It's quite common to pair FPGAs with ARM processors. Xilinx Zynq (for example, there are many others) places a Cortex A-9 alongside Artix-7 FPGA fabric. In a sense Microchip are simply doing the same thing except with higher end cores and without paying ARM. The use for this is simply where you need to couple some hardware bits with some software to control it, and you don't want to have a separate host computer (or your host computer is doing something else!). A simple example might be an experimental music synthesizer: You could generate sound envelopes "in hardware" (in the FPGA) because that requires tight timing and IO wired to the DAC, but control the notes and the song from the processor in software, because writing that in C or Python is way easier. The Zynq product page here has a few example applications: https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-7000.html https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-700... One use case I've actually seen is somewhat ironic: They were prototyping a RISC-V core on the FPGA fabric, and using the ARM core in the FPGA to serve memory and I/O cycles to the RISC-V core. (For this to make sense you have to know that prototyped FPGA cores run really slowly, eg. 50 MHz or less, so even a low-end ARM core can easily keep up)
  • tudorw 7y ago
    thank you :)