zedboard Zed Board

[SGY]

want to buy ZEDBOARD ZYNQ-7000 ARM/FPGA SOC.  Will RTL code provided with the board?  what do i expect to get?  Thanks,

[zygot]

@SGY

What you will get is a pretty nice, somewhat elderly but very useful FPGA development hardware. You also get the Zedboard community and all of its postings. There are numerous tutorials written expressly for a version of this board. I highlighted 'a version' because you need to know that there were a few important hardware changes in the life of the board. Because it's older most of the tutorials were written for long gone versions of ISE or Vivado and might be difficult to follow as the Vivado user experience changes with every new version. As to RTL code you can find some but since this is a ZYNQ product the emphasis is on the ARM development. I've had the C version of the board for quite a while and still make use of it when I need a Zynq solution. The Zedboard contributions are at this time mostly old at this time so you will have to learn the whole Zynq development ecosystem. Once you've done a few PL designs it will get easier. Zygot's hint for the day is to let Vivado create a Zynq HDL toplevel source file in a project that you, not Vivado, manage. You can instantiate that into your own toplevel design with all of the PL magic that you can conjure up. You'll have to trust me that this is the far easier way to go if you want to do FPGA development with ARM support. Your opinion is more important (to you) than mine however...

[jpeyron]

Hi @SGY,

Welcome to the Digilent Forums!

The Zedboard is a collaboration between a few companies.

Due to this situation, there are a two places to look for good documentation. Here is the Digilent resource center for the Zedboard. The Avnet site is zedboard.org .

The ZYNQ book was written for the Zedboard and the Zybo Zynq boards. 

The Zedboard OLED demo is written in Verilog.  I would also look at the FPGA4FUN and Asic world for more basic non specific board HDL code.

The Zedboard has a ZYNQ processor where some of the components like the DDR and USB UART bridge are tied directly to the Arm Core. These components will not be able to be used in the PL with HDL but can be used in the PS using the ZYNQ processor. I have attached an image that should help with visualizing this.

best regards,

Jon

[SGY]

Hi zygot:

Thanks for your quick reply.  Do I need Vivado 2014 or latest Version to develop Zync? 

My application is simple:  we need 70 GPIOs and use CPU to do some simple controls through GPIOs. Is Zedboard suitable for the job?  

 

Thanks,

 

Shuguang 

[JColvin]

Hi @SGY,

You could realistically use any version of Vivado to program the Zynq chip on the Zedboard, though some of the projects will expect certain versions of Vivado and Xilinx SDK to be used in order for the projects to work the first time without any modifications.

As for the pin requirements, it depends what GPIO functions you need. There are 4 Pmod ports on the Zedboard that are not constrained to any particular usage, but otherwise the Zedboard has 8 switches and 5 buttons as well. However, this only adds up to about 45 GPIO, so the other unassigned GPIO are present on the FMC connector. However, depending on what application you need for your GPIO, you may be hard pressed to find a FMC card that suits your needs.

What sort of simple controls are you hoping to do?

Thanks,
JColvin

[SGY]

On ‎4‎/‎22‎/‎2019 at 1:37 PM, JColvin said:

Hi @SGY,

You could realistically use any version of Vivado to program the Zynq chip on the Zedboard, though some of the projects will expect certain versions of Vivado and Xilinx SDK to be used in order for the projects to work the first time without any modifications.

As for the pin requirements, it depends what GPIO functions you need. There are 4 Pmod ports on the Zedboard that are not constrained to any particular usage, but otherwise the Zedboard has 8 switches and 5 buttons as well. However, this only adds up to about 45 GPIO, so the other unassigned GPIO are present on the FMC connector. However, depending on what application you need for your GPIO, you may be hard pressed to find a FMC card that suits your needs.

What sort of simple controls are you hoping to do?

Thanks,
JColvin

Hi JColvin,

I borrowed a Xilinx ZC702 board and brought it up.  I built a Vivado project, generated bit file and SDK.  I can run LED tests via GPIO with ZC702.  We really want to use Zedboard since it is smaller.  How much work involved to bring up Zedboard?  what is included in the Zedboard package?  How many useful I/O in Zedboard?

Thanks,

 

Shuguang

[jpeyron]

Hi @SGY,

Using the ZC702 would be similar to using the Zedboard.  I would suggest to look at the zedboards resource center here, and the reference manual.  Here is a tutorial on installing the Digilent board files. The reference manual describes in more detail the available GPIO. I would also suggest looking at zedboard.org for additional demo and documentation.

best regards,

Jon