Ultra96-V2 96Boards AI Platform Adds Certified WiFi, PMICs, Industrial Temperature Range

96Boards Xilinx Ultrascale+ Board

Avnet Ultra96 was unveiled last year as one of the four 96Boards AI platforms designed to develop applications leveraging hardware to accelerated artificial intelligence workloads. The 96Boards CE compliant board comes with a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, 2GB RAM, a 16GB microSD card, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity and more. The company has now launched an upgraded version with Ultra96-V2 featuring most of the same specifications but with a WiFi & Bluetooth module certified in 75 countries, industrial temperature range, and Infineon’s PMIC’s for additional power control and monitoring. Ultra96-V2 specifications: SoC – Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC ZU3EG A484 with four Cortex A53 cores, two Cortex-R5 core, Arm Mali-400MP2 GPU, and FPGA Fabric System Memory – 2 GB (512M x32) LPDDR4 Memory Storage – 16 GB MicroSD card + adapter pre-loaded with PetaLinux environment Video Output – Mini DisplayPort (MiniDP) Connectivity – Microchip ATWILC3000 certified 802.11 b/g/n WiFi 4 / Bluetooth […]

PYNQ-Z2 Python FPGA Board Adds Raspberry Pi Header, 24-Bit Audio Codec

PYNQ-Z2

PYNQ-Z1 is a board by Digilent powered by Xilinx Zynq-7020 Arm Cortex-A9 + FPGA SoC that’s designed specifically for PYNQ, an open-source project that aims to ease the design of embedded systems with Xilinx Zynq Systems on Chips (SoCs) by leveraging the Python language and libraries. PYNQ-Z2 is very similar to PYNQ-Z1, but it’s made by Taiwanese company TUL, and the board is slightly longer to allow for an extra 40-pin Raspberry Pi compatible header, and Analog Devices ADAU1761 24-bit audio codec. PYNQ-Z2 board specifications: SoC – Xilinx Zynq-7020 (XC7Z020-1CLG400C) dual core Arm Cortex-A9 processor @ 650 MHz with FPGA with 13,300 logic slices, each with four 6-input LUTs and 8 flip-flops 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 and HDMI Out Audio – Mic in, Line Out  ADAU1761 codec […]

Embedded Recipes 2018 Videos and Slides Released

Upstream Multimedia Amlogic-SoC-Embedded Recipes 2018 Videos

Embedded Recipes 2018 happened in Mozilla building in Paris, France on September 24 & 25, where developers talked about “open source solutions in the embedded world: developer, contributor, tools, platforms…” We previously mentioned the event in a post about an open source video decoder driver for Amlogic S905, S905X and S912 processors with BayLibre scheduled to talk about their work there. There’s now released slides and videos for the event for all sessions including: SoC+FPGA support in 2018 by Marek Vasut Shared memory and telemetry by Yves-Marie Morgan Updating an embedded system with swupdate by Charles-Antoine Couret Finding sources of latency in your system by Steven Rostedt Io(M)T Security: A year in review by Rayna Stamboliyska Using yocto to generate container images for yocto by Jérémy Rosen linuxboot by Jean-Marie Verdun and  Trammell Hudson End-to-end software production for embedded by Guy Lunardi WooKey: the USB Battlefront Warrior by Mathieu Renard, […]

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

UltraZed EV Starter Kit

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 […]

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 […]

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

PYNQ Z1

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 […]

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 […]

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

Hikey-970

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, […]