Architecting and Building High-Speed SoCs

Design a high speed SoC, gain a holistic view of the FPGA design flow and overcome its challenges

Key Features

• Use the development tools to implement and verify an SoC including the ARM CPUs and the FPGA logic
• Overcome the challenge of time to market by using FPGA SoCs and avoid the prohibitive ASIC NRE cost
• Understand the integration of custom logic accelerators and the SoC software and build them

Book Description

Modern and complex SoCs can adapt to many demanding system requirements by combining the processing power of ARM processors and the feature-rich Xilinx FPGAs. You'll need to understand the interfaces and protocols that put together a high speed SoC targeting an FPGA device, pinpoint the bottlenecks and define the architecture of an SoC in an FPGA to produce a superior solution in optimal time and cost.

This book adopts a practical approach to help you master both the hardware and software design flows, understand key interconnects and interfaces, analyze the system performance and enhance it using the acceleration techniques and finally build an RTOS-based software application for an advanced SoC design. Beginning with an introduction to the FPGA SoCs technology fundamentals and their associated development design tools, the book will guide you in building the SoC hardware and software, starting from the architecture definition to testing on a demo board or a virtual platform. The level of complexity evolves as the book progresses and it covers advanced applications such as communications, security, and coherent hardware acceleration. By the end of this book, you'll learn the concepts underlying FPGA SoCs advanced features and you'll have constructed a high speed SoC targeting a high end FPGA from the ground up.

What you will learn

• Understand SoC FPGAs main features, advanced buses and interface protocols
• Develop and verify an SoC hardware platform on an FPGA based SoC
• Explore the main tools for building the SoC hardware and software
• Build advanced SoCs using hardware acceleration with custom IPs
• Implement an OS-based software application targeting an FPGA based SoC
• Learn the hardware and software integration techniques for SoC FPGAs
• Use the tools to co-debug the SoC software and hardware
• Gain insights into communication and DSP principles in FPGA based SoCs

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for FPGA and ASIC hardware and firmware developers, IoT engineers, and anyone interested in understanding the process of developing a complex SoC including all aspects of the hardware design and the associated firmware design. A basic knowledge of digital electronics and some experience of coding in VHDL or Verilog and C or a similar language suitable for embedded systems. A general knowledge of FPGA and CPU architecture will be helpful but not required for using this book.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing FPGA Devices and SoCs
2. FPGA Devices and SoCs Design Tools
3. Basic and Advanced On-chip Busses and Interconnects
4. Connecting High Speed Devices Using Busses and Interconnects
5. Basic and Advanced SoC Interfaces
6. What Goes Where in a High Speed SoC Design
7. FPGA SoC Hardware Design and Verification Flow
8. FPGA SoC Software Design Flow
9. SoC Design Hardware and Software Integration
10. Building a Complex SoC Hardware Targeting an FPGA
11. Addressing the Security Aspects of an FPGA based SoC
12. Building a Complex Software with an Embedded Operating System Flow
13. Video, Image and Digital Signal Processing Principles in FPGAs and SoCs
14. Communication and Control Systems Implementation in FPGAs and SoCs