Hardware TestBench Laboratory
Device Under Test
In order to make real silicon simulation of the synthesized signal processing HDL code, we have chosen the Zedboard as the platform development kit. It sports a Xilinx Zynq-7000 device, that includes 7-series programmable logic plus a dedicated dual core ARM Cortex-A9.
Xilinx Zynq
Extensible System-on-Chip Platform
>By using the tighly coupled programmable logic and CPU complex, generated signal processing structures can be inserted into a new AMBA bus peripheral. By this way, we can control the input/output ports of the generated core, testing the signal processing hardware in real-world applications.
Integrated high-bandwidth ADC
>Xilinx 7-Series devices includes on package flexible Analog to Digital converter (XADC). By using this, there is a huge available bandwidth for injecting digitized analog real data in our tests (i.e. bandbase processing, channel equalization...).
FPGA Toolchain
>In the Libre-FDATool workstation, Xilinx toolchain (ISE, XPS, PlanAhead...) is installed right on the Scientific Linux host O.S: by this way, the full power of the 64bits x86 hardware in the machine is used to time consuming tasks as synthesizing, Place & Route...
Embedded Toolchain
In order to handle in an efficient way the dual ARM Cortex-A9 in the Zynq-7000, we must use an appropiate ARM toolchain and operative system, and our choice has been the ones provided by the Linaro project.
Linaro is a not-for-profit engineering organization consolidating and optimizing open source Linux software and tools for the ARM architecture. Linaro's key value is in working on generic ARM technology that is common to all ARM SoC vendors.
Operating System
>ARM Linux Internet Platform (ALIP): ALIP is a small distribution used for bringing up ARM boards both by ARM internally and by various customers. It has previously been generated from upstream sources, since Linaro started supporting the Ubuntu archive/packages, a new image was created based on Ubuntu, to satisfy ARM’s requirements with their previous ALIP images.
Development Tools
>Linaro Toolchain: Linaro provides advanced ARM-optimized native/cross compilation tools. As Zynq-7000 devices includes a dual core ARM Cortex-A9, we prefer using on target native compilation for building simple test applications. When heavy compilations need to be performed, we use the cross-compiler directly on the Scientific Linux host (i.e. Kernel compilation).