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 by UltraScale+ MPSoC XCZU7EV-1FBVB900E.

The kit is comprised of a system-on-module and baseboard with the following specifications:

UltraZed-EV SoM
- SoC – Xilinx UltraScale+ MPSoC XCZU7EV-1FBVB900E with:
  - 4x Arm Cortex A53 cores @ 1.5 GHz, 2x Cortex-R5 real-time cores @ 500 MHz
  - Arm Mali-400MP2 GPU @ 600 MHz
  - H.264/H.265 VPU with encode/decode up to 4K @ 60 fps
  - 504K logic cells, 461K flip flops, 11Mbit BRAM, 27 Mbit UltraRAM, 1728 DSP slices
- IO/s
  - 152x user PL (Programmable Logic) I/O
  - 26x user PS (Processor System) I/O
- Transceivers
  - GTR – 4x PS based PCIe Gen 2
  - GTH – 4x PL based transceivers with PCIe Gen 3
- Dimensions – 10.16 x 6.35 cm
UltraZed-EV carrier board
- Single UltraZed-EV SOM slot via 3 JX micro connectors (2 x 200-pin,
  1 x 120-pin) providing access to the module’s I/O and power signals
- Storage – microSD card connector, SATA 3.0 host interface
- Video I/O / DIsplay I/F
  - DisplayPort connector
  - LVDS Touch Panel interface
  - HDMI In/Out Interfaces
- Connectivity – RJ45 connector, dual SFP+ interfaces
- USB – USB 2.0/3.0 connector
- Expansion
  - PS PMOD header
  - 2x PL PMOD headers
  - PMBus header
  - 3G-SDI In/Out Interfaces
  - FMC HPC slot for FPGA mezzanine card
  - PCIe Gen2 x1 Root Port
- Debugging – Dual USB-UART; Digilent USB-JTAG module, PC4 JTAG header
- Misc – PL user DIP and Push switches, PL & PS user LEDs, PS VBATT battery, SOM reset switch, differential clock generator

UltraZed-EV Block Diagram — Click to Enlarge

A Linux BSP, a hardware reference design, and documentation are provided by the company. You’ll find most of that info on the product page, as well as the SoM and carrier card pages. The link BSP should eventually be released here.

The full kit includes UltraZed-EV SOM, UltraZed-EV carrier board, a 12V AC/DC power supply, a Quick Start Card, a micro USB cable, UltraZed-EV SOM mounting hardware, an 8GB microSD card, and an RJ45 Cable.

UltraZed-EV started kit is now available to customers in the Americas, EMEA, Asia, and Japan, for $1,595 on AVNet. The UltraZed I/O Carrier Card can be purchased separately for $649, and the extended temperature and industrial temperature version of UltraZed-EV SoM are sold for $999 and $1,199 respectively.

Via LinuxGizmos

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.