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    FPGA-Based Systems With MicroTCA

    Application Notes, Methodologies, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    FPGA-Based Systems With MicroTCA

    TB20250116

    Many FPGA-based systems projects are rather low volume and, therefore, favor off-the-shelf hardware over the costs and risks of custom hardware (PCB) design.
    MicroTCA or mTCA or µTCA is a 20+ year old standard from PICMG for implementing embedded systems using off-the-shelf hardware. Most often MicroTCA is used for test & measurement or for scientific applications when application specific IOs and signals need to be processed where FPGAs provide the flexibility and processing performance.
    However, as we will demonstrate in this Technical Brief, MicroTCA carries a huge baggage, and has little to no advantages over other approaches, namely FPGA based System-on-Modules or the “good old” PC architecture.

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    Shift-Left Your FPGA Design Projects

    Application Notes, Methodologies, , , , , ,

    Shift-Left Your FPGA Design Projects

    TB20231221

    Summary

    FPGA Full System Stacks comprising off-the-shelf FPGA System-on-Modules (SoM) plus pre-validated FPGA IP Cores and subsystems can greatly accelerate the time-to-market of your FPGA design project. Advantages of FPGA Full System Stacks include:

    1. FPGA developers can rely on a tested and verified subsystem implementation. The concept of re-use increases design productivity while sharing the FPGA subsystem development costs and risks over many users.
    2. Pre-validated FPGA IP-Cores and subsystems make clever use of the different FPGA resources to realize a cost/performance optimized domain-specific architecture.
    3. Software is included in the form of kernel space device drivers, user-space programmer APIs, and sometimes even complete OS images, all nicely tuned for guaranteeing the overall system’s reliability and performance.

    FPGA Full System Stacks from MLE are integrated with select FPGA SoMs from Trenz Electronics and are focused on applications such as:

    • Realiable, Low-Latency, High-Throughput Network Transports
    • High-Speed Data Acquisition
    • Augmented Stereo Computer Vision
    • High-Speed Data Record & Replay

    We describe a design methodology using FPGA Full System Stacks and share our experiences from real customer designs.

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    High Level Synthesis for Intel and Xilinx FPGAs

    Application Notes, Methodologies

    High Level Synthesis for Intel and Xilinx FPGAs

    TB20201203
    Version 1.0

    Missing Link Electronics (MLE) has been an early adopter of High Level Synthesis (HLS) for FPGAs. In particular for Domain-Specific Architectures which aim to accelerate algorithms and communication protocols HLS delivers on the promised benefits:

    • Increased productivity as we can focus on the behavior and let HLS do the scheduling and resource mapping
    • Better portability across FPGA device families and even across FPGA device vendors

    This MLE Technical Brief describes our findings when using HLS to accelerate a telecommunications network protocol accelerator with FPGA. Driven by the project’s need for short Time-to-Market major portions have been implemented in C/C++ using HLS. And given the application’s large unit volume it was important to evaluate cost/performance across a set of Intel and Xilinx FPGA devices.

    Our example uses Intel and Xilinx HLS to implement a specialized Packet FIFO. This Packet FIFO is then integrated as a particular design block into a block-based top-level design. Despite the fact that Intel HLS and Xilinx HLS behave quite differently, and do require special code, we did see a benefit from using HLS compared to “classical” RTL design using VHDL and/or Verilog HDL.

    Hence, we encourage the reader to follow a similar approach.

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    PCIe Non-Transparent Bridging (PCIe NTB)

    Application Notes, Methodologies,

    Tool Options When Debugging an FPGA-based PCIe Non-Transparent Bridge (PCIe NTB) Used in an ECU for Autonomous Driving

    TB20190424

    We share our findings and experiences when debugging an FPGA-based PCIe Non-Transparent Bridge (PCIe NTB) used in an Electronic Control Unit (ECU) for Autonomous Vehicles. After explaining key inner workings of PCIe and PCIe Non-Transparent Bridge we discuss debugging using embedded logic analyzers (Xilinx ChipScope / ILA), RTL Simulators (XSim from the Xilinx Vivado toolsuite as well as Questa Prime from Mentor Graphics) plus Visualizer, also from Mentor Graphics. We hope that you find this useful when you are preparing to debug your next FPGA project.

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