Zynq-based Embedded Development Kit for University Programs

Creativity and innovation, which lead the society to success, rest on the foundational institutions such as schools and universities. They provide fertile soil to seed, grow and flourish enterprises. To harvest more within an industry, the ecosystem needs to be enriched where the seeds are grown. Considering that the university’s courses are the nutrition to student, they need to be designed in a productive manner as they will provide the next generation of engineers. By providing the necessary platform in addition to the rich and informative tutorials, the quality of the input information for students would be assured. Particularly in the field of Electrical and Computer Engineering, it is important that students get as much hands on experience as possible, and tackle design challenges – such as HW/SW co-design and co-verification – before entering the job market; for their own benefit as well as the industry as a whole.

In this blog, you will become familiar with the TySOM Education kit (TySOM EDU) package designed for the university courses related to hardware design and embedded system design researches.

The TySOM EDU contains a TySOM embedded development board, Riviera-PRO advanced hardware simulator and informative tutorials and reference designs. Although it is possible to choose any development board from the TySOM embedded development board family, the TySOM-1A-7Z010 would be the most cost-effective solution for most university projects.

TySOM-1A-7Z010 (ZynqTM) is a ready-to-use and feature-rich embedded development board which provides the required peripherals to tackle both basic and advanced Zynq-based projects. The XC7Z010 is based on the Xilinx® All Programmable System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture, which integrates a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Xilinx 7-series Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) logic. Coupling the device to a rich set of peripherals for connectivity, communication and multimedia, makes this board ideal for university projects requiring HW/SW co-design.

HDMI IN/OUT, on-board memories, USB OTG, Ethernet and an SD card reader bring your design up and running with no additional hardware needed. The two Pmod connectors are also available for additional hardware connection. You can find more information about this product here.

In addition to the peripherals available on the TySOM-1A-7Z010 board, the educational package comes with informative tutorials; ranging from entry level through to more advanced. These tutorials can be used as university lab projects related to embedded system design, HW/SW co-design, digital system design as well as any course material related to FPGAs. These tutorials include, but are not limited to:

• Complete reference design from the basic to the advanced level design
• Configuring and compiling Linux kernel image and adding GUI
• Starting with Vivado HLS to create HW/SW projects
• Communicating with the peripherals on the board such as accelerometer
• Creating HW/SW projects based on Pmod modules such as Wi-Fi, Temperature, luminance, OLED and etc
• High speed video processing project by offloading edge detection algorithms to the FPGA
• Automotive Driving Assistant System (ADAS) reference design
• IoT gateway demo design utilizing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth sensors
• Face and drowsiness detection demo design

Figure. 1, shows a TySOM-1A-7Z010 board. Having all of the necessary peripherals embedded into a small board, makes this board easily portable.

Figure 1: TySOM-1A-7Z010 Development Board

In addition to the rich tutorials and documentation for a wide variety of projects, TySOM EDU kit – which includes TySOM-2-7Z045/100 boards - comes with both Vivado design suite and Xilinx SDx tool by which you can use to accelerate computationally demanding algorithms in hardware. The TySOM EDU package also consists of Riviera-Pro advanced RTL simulator, which has an advance feature to simulate and verify HW/SW designs, by using Aldec Co-simulation platform. Here you can learn more about the newest Aldec HW/SW co-simulation platform for Zynq designs. For more info about the package please visit Aldec’s University Program webpage.