What’s Popular in FPGAs Today and Why You Should Care

What’s Popular in FPGAs Today and Why You Should Care: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

What’s Popular in FPGAs Today and Why You Should Care: this mp4 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Ray Hoare:
Ray with concurrent EDA. I'm going to talk to you about what's popular in FPGAs. We are FPGA nerds, if you will. We've been doing this for 19 years. We are elite certified by AMD, which means that we've been doing this a lot and seen a lot. And I just want to bring something that that I'm, we're obsessed with, frankly, is in the FPGA world, and I apologize. It's a little busy, but there's a lot here and what's really, really popular and we've seen it through lots of customers is the zinc ultrascale+ and that is the Ultrascale+. It's been around for many years. Um, it's really popular in the embedded space where you really care about deterministic IO and you care about power in the 5 to 25W. Typically it's under five watts. And so you can get that flexible IO Plus low power. And you can run Linux or you can run a real time OS. But let's look at what does that mean? What's inside of this chip. And when I'm talking about this chip here is a system on a module. And this chip that silver thing is that's the zinc, um, multi-processor system on a chip or mpsoc. So the other thing, actually, I forgot that that really blows my mind is where will you be in 2020 2045? It's 2025 now, but in 20 years this chip is still going to be in production.

Ray Hoare:
And it's been in production for a number of years and it's been tried and true. So inside of this chip are a bunch of things. The biggest thing is your CPU and they call those the application processing unit as an ARM cortex A53 in there, plus caching and floating point. And there are four of those cores. Some parts have fewer but or two. Um, but you know, you can have 1 to 4 of those cores. The other thing you can have is real time cores which run by themselves and they can run in lockstep. There are two of them, and they can be used for safety critical or something where it's always running. It's not. It's really for reliability. So if you have a CPU, well you need memory. So part of this chip it has access to DDR memory built into it. There's actually a graphics processing unit on here and there's platform management. So if you have power management or functional safety that's in the platform management unit. And then there's also configuration security. So if you're doing your design and you put it on a chip you don't want someone to steal it. And so that's you have encryption in there and all sorts of other things like trust zones and and things that are great to make your whole system work.

Ray Hoare:
And I want to go too far in the details. But the other thing that these chips have is they have lots and lots and lots of IO. So if you want a DisplayPort, USB three, or PCIe. Or you want to do Gigabit Ethernet. They have Gigabit Ethernet Macs already built into them. So you have all of these standard things that's actually just in the in the processing system. But then you have programmable logic, traditional FPGA where you have different kinds of memories, where you have block memories, which are, you know, a thousand bytes each, but there are hundreds of them where you have ultra Ram. So you want to do storage of larger amounts. And then we have high performance I o versus high density IO high performance where you want to hit LVDS lines or you want to do, um, mipi camera interfaces or things of that nature or high density IO, which is you're going to get higher voltage levels and a lot more flexibility there. And then there's these Multi-gigabit transceivers. They call them the high speed kind of connectivity. And that's really where you want to talk to a ten gig line. You want to talk to a 25 gig Ethernet, and you really want to be able to move data a lot. So if you're using a GPU and some of them have a GPU and they have ten gig lines in there and you want flexibility, you can add it with an FPGA and then you can get the best of both worlds.

Ray Hoare:
But FPGAs are really on the lower power, and you can put it embedded. So you have all this capability on that one chip. But how do you put it into a design? That's where a system on a module comes in, and a system on a module is not only is it the zinc ultrascale+, but it's all of the support circuitry that goes with it. For example, you have your memory. In this case it's DDR memory that's on the module. And you can actually see that up on the module here. And you can see there's all sorts of other things in the module and there's more circuitry underneath it. So for example this one it has storage on there. So you have flash memory. And then because it's a chip you have oscillators. And that's what you also oscillators down here on more oscillators here for your, uh, USB and USB requires a PHY. And so therefore they put that on the board on this module or an Ethernet PHY, which means you don't have to put on your carrier board. So the idea here is they take all of the things that you always need to have with your zinc.

Ray Hoare:
And they put it on a small module, and then you just create the the custom carrier board, which is much simpler. And so that you can then put your custom I o on there that talks to your peripherals, and you can put it in whatever form factor you want, whether it's for video or for robotics or for military. Um, you can see all of these I o and they have different bank numbers. And these banks correlate to voltage levels. And we can help you out with that. So if you need any help or you want to look at, you know, what does this mean for me. We've been doing it for almost 20 years. So, uh, also these are made in Germany. Trends electronic. We're one of their distributors and we're a customer first. And then we said, hey, we love your parts. Don't you have a US distributor? We became a US distributor for them. So and we will can help you with volume pricing as well. All right so zinc ultra scale. What can I do with it. So we talked about all the stuff in the upper left there. That processing system all that stays the same. But if you want more IO or less IO or higher speed or lower speed, you can get anywhere from a like Raspberry Pi style device on the lower end, which still has 81,000 logic cells and 216 digital signal processing blocks to do math and with it, but not a whole lot of IO.

Ray Hoare:
Maybe you don't want to pay for that. You're not using it? Great. Don't put it on there. But then you go all the way up here to the Z19, which is a wonderful beast which has over a million logic cells. So this is just a beast, and you can do lots and lots with it. So if you have a big networking device and you want to run 25 gig Ethernet, you want to run a whole bunch of them. Great. This is what you can do with PCIe and then 1900 DSP slices. Like, I don't know, what math do you want to do? Yeah, we can do it. We can do floating point with it. So there's all sorts of things that we can do with that transceivers, which is high speed IO. If you have an ADC or you have a camera, all things. And so this this ultra scale just runs the gamut. And it's been out there. It's tried and true. Um, we love it. So we love it so much. We're distributing it. So there are different versions of this part and there are different sizes of the modules. And you can see we have all sorts of different size modules because, well, let's put a lot more memory on it.

Ray Hoare:
Well you need to have a little bit bigger module. But most of these things are about the size less than the size of a deck of cards. There are 500 modules available. We have a bunch of them listed on our website. But the nice thing here is, okay, you find this, you got your 500 different modules. You're like, yeah, but I don't want that. And I want you guys to put the I o on it or I want you to do the carrier board. Great. Give us a call. We'd be happy to help you. The company that makes these trans electronic, they do their own design of the modules and it's. And they do their own fab. So they have their own Smt line and they QA all done in Germany. Um, wonderfully reliable. And they have been in business quite a while. And they keep producing these modules as long as the chips are available. And that's so that's through 2045. These modules are going to be available. Um, and we can help you pick out the right module for your application. We do do FPGA design services, but Linux drivers you name it. Give us a call. We're happy to help you. Your success is our success. Um, so thank you very much and have a great day.

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