Xilinx Zynq Category - Page 6 of 11 - CNX Software

August 27, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

UltraZed-EV Starter Kit Support Simultaneous 4K Encoding and Decoding with Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ EV MPSoC

Xilinx unveiled Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC‘s combining Arm Cortex A53/R5 cores with FPGA fabric back in 2015. and we started to see development boards and products based on the solution starting in 2017 with offerings such as AXIOM Board, TRENZ TE0808 SoM, or more recently 96Boards compliant Ultra96 development board. All last three boards have one thing in common: they all use an Zynq UltraScale+ GC MPSoC that adds a Mali-400MP2 GPU to CG MPSoC family. But there’s also a third EV family which standards for “Embedded Vision”, and adds support for 4K H.264 / H.265 hardware video codec capable of simultaneous encode and decode. The platform targets multimedia, automotive ADAS, surveillance, and other embedded vision applications. So far, I don’t think I had seen any boards based on Ultrascale+ EV MPSoC, but AVNet – following up on their UltraZed-EG starter kit – has now launched an UltraZed-EV starter kit powered […]

June 28, 2018July 13, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Air-T Artificial Intelligence Radio Transceiver SDR Platform Combines NVIDIA Jetson TX2 and Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA (Crowdfunding)

If often write about low end and cheaper hardware on this blog, but not in this post. Deepwave Digital Air-T (Artificial Intelligence Radio – Transceiver) is a high-end software defined radio platform with continuous frequency coverage from 300 MHz to 6 GHz. The board combines AD9371 RFIC transceiver providing up to 2 x 2 MIMO of 100 MHz of receiving bandwidth, a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, and NVIDIA Jetson TX2 module. Air-T hardware specifications & key features: Software-defined Radio Analog Devices 9371 2×2 MIMO transceiver 2 x RX channels (100 MHz each) 2 x TX channels (100 MHz each) Auxiliary RX channels: Observation & Sniffer. Note: Can use either Observation or Sniffer at one time; utilizes one of the RX channels NVIDIA Jetson TX2 for processing 256 NVIDIA CUDA core GPU 6 CPU cores – 2x NVIDIA Denver2, 4x Arm Cortex-A57 8GB RAM 32GB eMMC flash Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA with75k logic […]

June 15, 2018June 15, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Xilinx Zynq-7020 based PYNQ-Z1 Arm + FPGA Board is Meant to be Programmed with Python

Xilinx Zynq-7000 series is a family of SoC based on Arm Cortex A9 processor coupled with FPGA fabric, and since the introduction in 2012, we’ve seen may board based on the entry-level Zynq-7010 or Zynq-7020 SoCs. Digilent PYNQ-Z1 is another Xilinx Zynq board from the company, but it does not differentiate itself by its hardware features, and instead the software part is the most interesting. The board is designed to be used with PYNQ, a new open-source framework that enables embedded programmers to exploit the capabilities of Xilinx Zynq SoCs without having to design programmable logic circuits, relying instead on Python programming. Digilent PYNQ-Z1 hardware specifications: SoC – Xilinx Zynq-7020 (XC7Z020-1CLG400C) dual core Arm Cortex-A9 processor with FPGA with 1.3 M reconfigurable gates System Memory – 512MB DDR3 Storage – Micro SD card slot, 16MB QSPI Flash with factory programmed globally unique identifier (48-bit EUI-48/64 compatible). Video – HDMI In […]

June 6, 2018June 18, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Linux 4.17 Release – Main Changes, Arm & MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds released Linux 4.17 last Sunday: So this last week was pretty calm, even if the pattern of most of the stuff coming in on a Friday made it feel less so as the weekend approached. And while I would have liked even less changes, I really didn’t get the feeling that another week would help the release in any way, so here we are, with 4.17 released. No, I didn’t call it 5.0, even though all the git object count numerology was in place for that. It will happen in the not _too_distant future, and I’m told all the release scripts on kernel.org are ready for it, but I didn’t feel there was any real reason for it. I suspect that around 4.20 – which is I run out of fingers and toes to keep track of minor releases, and thus start getting mightily confused – I’ll switch […]

March 19, 2018March 28, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 22 Comments

96Boards Unveils Four A.I. Developer Platforms: HiKey 970, Ultra96, ROCK960 PRO & Enterprise Edition

Many new processors include a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) – aka Neural Network Accelerator (NNA) – in order to speed up talks associated with artificial intelligence, such as object or other patterns recognitions. With Linaro Connect Hong Kong 2018, 96Boards has just unveiled four development boards specifically designed for artificial intelligence solution with Hikey 970 powered by Hisilicon Kirin 970 processor, Ultra96 based on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZU3EG ARM+ FPGA SoC, and ROCK960 PRO & Enterprise Edition featuring the upcoming Rockchip RK3399Pro processor. Hikey 970 Preliminary specifications: SoC – Kirin 970 with 4x Cortex A73 @ 2.36GHz, 4x Cortex A53 @ 1.8GHz, Arm Mali G72-MP12 GPU, NPU with 256MAC/cycle @ 960MHz System Memory – 6GB 1866MHz, 4 Channel LPDDR4x Storage -64GB UFS storage, micro SD card slot Video Output – HDMI 1.4 up to 1080p60 Camera – 4 lanes CSI + 2 lanes CSI Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet, wireless module, […]

January 30, 2018January 30, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

UltraZed-EG SoM and Starter Kit Feature Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZU3EG MPSoC

Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ Arm Cortex A53 + FPGA MPSoCs were announced in 2015, with actual products launched in early 2017 such as AXIOM development board or Trenz Electronic TE0808 UltraSOM+ system-on-module which are based on the ZU9EG model, and cost several thousand dollars. Recently, I wrote about Mycroft Mark II smart speaker based on a “quad core Xilinx processor”, and initially I assumed it was an Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoCs since those are the only Xilinx “quad core processors” I know of, but now I think it must be an unannounced part, since the company can’t provide the exact part number, and the price would be too low. Nevertheless, this lead me to check out if there was any lower cost boards based Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC with four Arm Cortex A53 cores, and ZU2EG is the entry-level part that matches this description. I could not find a ZU2EG development board, […]

January 27, 2018January 27, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Mycroft Mark II Smart Speaker / Voice Assistant Works with Open Source Software (Crowdfunding)

Smart speakers have gain a lot of traction over the last few years, but many of the solutions are based on Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa voice services, with both companies likely tracking your voice searches the same way they track your online searches to provide a “personalized experience” and sell you products or server ads that match your interests. If you don’t like being tracked that way, a solution is to use an open source voice assistant such as Mycroft, and install it on a Linux computer, Raspberry Pi 3 board, or Android device. The company also introduced Mark I reference hardware platform based on Raspberry Pi 2 in 2015, and while all those hardware options should be fine for the technically inclined, but not really suited to the typical end user, and AFAIK they all lack a microphone array for better hot word detection. So Mycroft has come […]

January 23, 2018March 8, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

FOSDEM 2018 Open Source Developers Meeting Schedule

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting) occurs every year on the first week-end of February, where developers meet for two days discussing about open source software projects. FOSDEM 2018 will take place on February 3-4 this year with 652 speakers, 684 events, and 57 tracks, an increase over last year 608 speakers, 653 events, and 54 tracks. There will be 8 main tracks namely: Community, History, Miscellaneous, Performance, Python, Security and Encryption, Space, and Global Diversity CFP Day. There will also be 33 developer rooms, and since the full schedule is now available, I’ll make a virtual schedule mostly based on sessions from the Embedded, mobile, and automotive, Hardware Enablement, and Internet of Things devrooms. Saturday 3, 2018 09:50 – 10:15 – Turning On the Lights with Home Assistant and MQTT by Leon Anavi In this presentation you will learn the exact steps for using MQTT JSON […]