xilinx News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

September 19, 2020 by Ayo Ayibiowu - No Comments

MYIR launches FZ5 EdgeBoard AI Box for AI on the Edge

Back in July of this year (2020), MYRI technology announced the MYIR’s FZ3 deep learning accelerator card powered by the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZU3EG Arm FPGA MPSoC and it is capable of delivering up to 1.2TOPS computing power. With only a few months since that launch, MYRI technology is now announcing another two related sets of products – FZ5 EdgeBoard AI Box and the FZ5 Card. The FZ5 EdgeBoard AI Box is an AI-focused computing platform that is based on the FZ5 AI Accelerator card which is an upgrade of the FZ3 card. The FZ5 looks more like a single board computer than an actual computing card. The FZ5 accelerator is powered by the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZU5EV MPSoC which features a 1.5 GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 64-bit application processor, a 600MHz dual-core real-time Arm Cortex-R5 processor, a Mali400 embedded GPU and is capable of delivering up to 2.4 TFLOPS as compared to the predecessor FZ3’s 1.2 TFLOPS based on the Xilinx […]

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September 26, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linaro Connect SF 2017 Welcome Keynote – New Members, Achievements, the Future of Open Source, and More…

Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017 is now taking place until September 29, and it all started yesterday with the Welcome Keynote by George Grey, Linaro CEO discussing the various achievements since the last Linaro Connect in Budapest, and providing an insight to the future work to be done by the organization. The video is available on YouTube (embedded below), and since I watched it, I’ll provide a summary of what was discussed: Welcoming New Members – Kylin (China developed FreeBSD operating systems) joined LEG (Enterprise Group), NXP added LHG (Home Group) membership, and Xilinx joined LITE (IoT and Embedded). Achievements OPTEE open portable trusted environment execution more commonly integrated into products. Details at optee.org. LEG 17.08 ERP release based on Linux 4.12, Debian 8.9 with UEFI, ACPI, DPDK, Bigtop, Hadoop, etc… LITE group has been involved in Zephyr 1.9 release, notably contributing to LwM2M stack More projects to be found on download page. Open source future with many fields involved […]

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February 17, 2017February 21, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

EU funded AXIOM Board is Powered by Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA + ARM SoC

Back in 2015, Xilinx unveiled Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC combining ARM Cortex A53 & Cortex R5 cores, a Mali-400MP2 GPU, and UltraScale FPGA, and the company recently launched ZCU102 Evaluation Kit based on the SoC, which sells for just under $3,000. But if you are based in the European Union, you’ll be glad to learn about 4 millions Euros of your taxes have been spent to design a board based on the same MPSoC family as part of the AXIOM project, which was developed in collaboration with European universities and companies with the “aim of researching new software/hardware architectures for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) to meet the expectations” in terms of computational power, energy efficiency, scalability through modularity, easy programmability, and leverage of the best existing standards at minimal costs. AXIOM (Agile, eXtensible, fast I/O Module) board’s key specifications: SoC – Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+ ZU9EG MPSoC with four ARM Cortex A53 cores @ 1.2GHz, two Cortex R5 “real-time” cores @ 500MHz, a […]

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January 30, 2017January 30, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

NovaVGA Shield Adds VGA Output to Arduino Boards

Arduino boards are convenient to control I/Os, link LEDs, and display info on small LCD displays, but if you want to output data to a larger monitor, it’s a bit more complex. NovaVGA shield for Arduino simplify the task of outputting data to a VGA monitor over SPI. NovaVGA shield hardware specifications: CPLD – Xilinx XC9572XL CPLD, user programmable via JTAG interface. SRAM Framebuffer – 160×120 pixels @ 6-bit color (2^6 = 64 possible colors) VGA Output – 640×480 @ 60Hz physical resolution (25.175MHz pixel clock) Interface with MCU – SPI mode 1 interface (consumes only three Arduino pins) Header pins not included MicroNova provides an Arduino library with various examples such as color palette, Mandelbrot, Tetris and text console, as well as a user’s guide and PDF schematics that can all be downloaded directly on the product page. NovaVGA shield sells for $29 on Tindie or directly on MicroNova store. Note that it’s not the first board of this […]

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July 12, 2016July 12, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

SiFive Introduces Freedom U500 and E500 Open Source RISC-V SoCs

Open source used to be a software thing, with the hardware design being kept secret for fear of being copied, but companies such as Texas Instruments realized that from a silicon vendor perspective it would make perfect sense to release open source hardware designs with full schematics, Gerber files and SoM, to allow smaller companies and hobbyists, as well as the education market, normally not having the options to go through standard sales channels and the FAE (Field Application Engineer) support, to experiment with the platform and potentially come up with commercial products. That’s exactly what they did with the Beagleboard community, but there’s still an element that’s closed source, albeit documented: the processor itself. But this could change soon, as SiFive, a startup founded by the creators of the free and open RISC-V architecture, has announced two open source SoCs with Freedom U500 processor and Freedom E300 micro-controller. Freedom U500 (Unleashed family) platform key specifications: U5 Coreplex with 1 […]

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January 27, 2016January 27, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

OpenAMP Open Source Framework Provides the Glue between Linux, RTOS, and Bare Metal Apps in Heterogeneous SoCs

SoCs becoming more complex, and go beyond homogeneous multicore systems by mixing different type of cores such as high performance cores, low power real-time cores, or even FPGA fabric. Examples include NXP i.MX6 SoloX with an ARM Cortex A9 core for Linux apps, and an ARM Cortex M4 core for real-time tasks, or Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC with Cortex A53 core for higher level apps, Cortex R5 cores for real-time processing, and Ultrascale FPGA logic. All these different cores are running their own Linux based OS, real-time operating system or bare metal application, and all this makes software development an even greater difficult tasks. In order to reduce the complexity, and address some of the issues, the Multicore Association has launched a new working group targeting the management, expansion, and standardization of OpenAMP (Open Asymmetric Multi Processing), an open source framework that allows operating systems to interact within a broad range of complex homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures and allows asymmetric […]

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October 2, 2015May 1, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Digilent ARTY is a $99 Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA Board with Arduino Headers

Low cost FPGA boards with Arduino headers are nothing new, as we’ve seen before with Arduissimo and Papilio DUO, but both of these boards are based on Spartan 6 FPGA, while the recent Digilent ARTY board is powered by an Artix-7 FPGA. Beside the hardware differences, Spartan 6 FPGAs only support Xilinx ISE Design Suite, while Artix-7 parts are also supported by Vivado Design Suite, which according to Xilinx has a much better workflow and user interface. Digilent ARTY specifications: FPGA – Xilinx XC7A35T-L1CSG324I with 33,280 logic cells, 1,800 Kb block RAM, 90 DSP slices, and 250 I/O pins System memory – 256 MB DDR3L SDRAM Storage – 16 MB of QSPI Flash Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet Expansion interfaces 4 Digilent compatible Pmod interfaces enabling 32 user I/O pins: 2 Pmods routed as differential pairs, paired to fit dual-wide Pmods Arduino UNO R3 shield / chipKit interface Debugging – USB-UART Interface, JTAG Programming/Configuration Port Misc – 4x user RGB LEDs, 4x […]

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