Introducing the Quad SFP28 FMC
High-speed Ethernet connectivity for FPGAs
Posted on July 16, 2024
| Jeff Johnson
In the next few days I will kick off the launch of another new Opsero FMC product: the Quad SFP28 FMC. This FMC card has 4x SFP28 slots that are compatible with SFP, SFP+ and SFP28 modules. The FMC and the reference designs that we are currently developing will enable 4x 10G/25G Ethernet links on a multitude of FPGA/MPSoC/RFSoC development boards including the newer Versal ACAP boards. We’ve already pushed working 10G/25G designs to the Github repo for the ZCU104, ZCU102, ZCU106, ZCU111 and ZCU208 with more coming soon.
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How to Install Vitis and PetaLinux 2024.1
For Ubuntu 20.04
Posted on July 2, 2024
| Jeff Johnson
Here we go again. In this post I’m going to go through the steps of installing Vitis and PetaLinux 2024.1. Unfortunately I have to go through this process on a regular basis. Installing dev tools like this from the biggest FPGA vendor in the world should be easy but for some reason there are always problems - hence the need to keep notes.
The image that I used for this post was generated by ChatGPT.
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The M.2 M-key Stack FMC Unveiled
A fresh approach to getting more from FMC
Posted on April 3, 2024
| Jeff Johnson
The FPGA Mezzanine Card standard (VITA 57.1) has significantly enhanced the FPGA ecosystem by decoupling the FPGA board from the input/output components. Years ago, if you wanted to process samples from an ADC, you would buy an FPGA board with an on-board ADC. If you wanted to add a DAC, or upgrade the ADC, you would replace the entire board! The FMC innovation provided developers with choice, so that they could select the right FPGA for their specific I/O requirements.
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Enabling VADJ on Versal VCK190 and VMK180
Posted on March 21, 2024
| Jeff Johnson
If you’ve taken a good look at the VCK190 or VMK180 Versal Evaluation boards, you would have noticed that it has a Zynq UltraScale+ device on it. This would be the central device on a lower cost development board, but on these boards it is just a lowly system controller. The system controller is there to manage power supplies, clocks and other on-board resources and it runs independently of the main device.
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Using NVMe SSDs with Versal VCK190 and VMK180
Posted on March 18, 2024
| Jeff Johnson
High-capacity non-volatile storage is pretty handy in the intensive computing applications that the Versal ACAP adaptive SoCs get employed in. NVMe SSDs are a perfect way to provide that storage because they can directly interface with the Versal’s integrated blocks for PCIe. Those integrated blocks are Gen4 compliant which makes for an extremely high bandwidth connection between the FPGA fabric and the storage medium.
Over the past couple of weeks, my team and I have been bringing up an NVMe SSD on the Versal AI Core VCK190 Evaluation kit using the FPGA Drive FMC Gen4 adapter.
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Multi-camera YOLOv5 on Zynq UltraScale+ with Hailo-8 AI Acceleration
Posted on February 15, 2024
| Jeff Johnson
See it live: The demo described in this post will be displayed live at the EBV Elektronik booth at Embedded World 2024 on April 9-11. I’ll be attending too, so get in touch if you’re keen to meet up. Over the last few months I’ve been lucky to work with two very talented people on an interesting project for multi-camera machine vision applications: Gianluca Filippini and Mario Bergeron. Back in 2022, I was contacted by Gianluca, an engineer from EBV Elektronik.
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Change the temp folder used by PetaLinux
Posted on November 8, 2023
| Jeff Johnson
When working with PetaLinux tools, we need to be wary of the often very sizeable temporary files generated during builds. These temporary files can often take up more than 10GB, and they are crucial for the build process.
By default, PetaLinux tools create a temporary folder internal to the project directory. Having it set this way is useful because our projects are well contained and we have clear insight into the total disk space used by a project.
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How to build PetaLinux in offline mode
ie. without a network connection
Posted on October 10, 2023
| Jeff Johnson
In certain scenarios, you might want to build PetaLinux without relying on an active internet connection. This offline building feature can be useful for various reasons. To build PetaLinux without a network connection, you obviously need pre-downloaded source packages and dependencies. Xilinx allows you to pre-download all of these dependencies (called sstate cache artefacts) and then perform the build offline.
Why You Would Use It The reason to use offline mode really depends on your situation and it’s definitely not something that everyone will get benefit from.
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Adding a script to the root file system in PetaLinux
And making it run on start-up
Posted on September 21, 2023
| Jeff Johnson
When designing custom PetaLinux builds, we often end up with a bunch of commands that we have to run after login to set things up and make initializations. Having a script built into the root filesystem can make this process easier, so in this post I’m going to show you how you can set that up in PetaLinux 2022.1.
These instructions assume that you already have a PetaLinux project created.
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A Smart Camera implemented in PetaLinux 2022.1 on ZCU104
Using a Raspberry Pi camera
Posted on July 12, 2023
| Jeff Johnson
In this post we’re going to build a smart camera using a Raspberry Pi camera, the ZCU104 board and PetaLinux. We’re going to do this by leveraging the Smartcam app which was originally designed for the AMD Xilinx Kria SoM. Our version of the Smartcam app can take video inputs from a Raspberry Pi camera, a USB camera or a file, and it can output video to a DisplayPort monitor, a file or via Ethernet over Real-time Transport Protocol.
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