Development board offers processor and FPGA performance
The Arty Z7 development board from Digilent helps designers build a range of motor control and embedded vision systems on a ready-to-use development platform with Arduino Uno- and Digilent chipKIT-compatible headers, Digilent Pmod connectors, and USB and HDMI ports. It is available at Mouser Electronics.
The development board is designed around the Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable system-on-chip (AP SoC), which integrates a dual-core 650MHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Xilinx’s 7-series field programmable gate array (FPGA) logic to offer to a powerful processor with a unique set of software-defined peripherals and controllers.
The board features a 1Msps analog-to-digital converter (ADC), DDR3 memory controller with eight direct-memory access (DMA) channels, high-bandwidth peripheral controllers via 1-gigabit Ethernet, a USB 2.0, and a serial/digital input/output (SDIO).
Low-bandwidth peripheral controllers are also available for SPI, UART, CAN, and I2C protocols.
The Arty Z7 ships with 512Mbytes of DDR3 memory with a 16-bit bus operating at 1050Mbits per second and 16Mbytes of Quad-SPI flash memory with factory-programmed 48-bit globally unique EUI-48/64 identifier.
The board also offers 53,200 lookup tables, 106,400 flip-flops, 630Kbytes of block RAM, four clock management tiles, and 49 inputs/outputs (I/Os). The processor is programmable from JTAG, Quad-SPI flash, and microSD card.