Compared to pure ARM or pure FPGA devices, the ARM+FPGA architecture can bring combined advantages in performance, cost, and power consumption. Each performs its own role, leveraging the unique advantages of its architecture, such as:

(1) ARM has rich interface resources and low power consumption, excelling in multimedia display and logic control.

(2) FPGA excels at multi-channel or high-speed AD acquisition, interface expansion, and high-speed signal transmission.

ARM and FPGA can quickly exchange data through high-speed communication interfaces, meeting various industrial application scenarios.

The ZYNQ series devices from Xilinx are classic ARM+FPGA SoC processors (ARM and FPGA packaged on the same chip), integrating single/dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 + Artix-7/Kintex-7 FPGA.

Because ZYNQ is an SoC device, it has the following advantages:

(1) High hardware integration, smaller size.

(2) Higher communication speed between ARM and FPGA.

(3) Peripheral interfaces can be flexibly configured.

However, some users may encounter the following issues when using ZYNQ (specifically referring to XC7Z010/XC7Z020), due to different functional requirements of the products:

(1) Limited interface resources.

(2) Poor HMI experience.

(3) Lower ARM main frequency.

(4) Higher development difficulty.

Tronlong Technology has launched the discrete ARM + FPGA industrial-grade core board SOM-TL437xF, which can perfectly solve the above issues.

The SOM-TL437xF core board integrates AM437x (TI ARM Cortex-A9) + Spartan-6 (Xilinx FPGA) processor, with internal ARM and FPGA connected via a GPMC high-speed parallel bus, with a communication speed of up to 624Mb/s.

(SOM-TL437xF core board video introduction)

ZYNQ has limited interface resources, so in practical applications, interface resources are often insufficient.

The SOM-TL437xF core board supports native LCD, CAMERA, GPMC, audio interfaces, and can support up to 4 native Ethernet ports, 6 native UART interfaces, with the number of USB, SDIO, SPI, and other interfaces all exceeding ZYNQ.

The ZYNQ FPGA has no dedicated RAM, while the FPGA side of the SOM-TL437xF core board is configured with 256M/512MByte dedicated DDR3, facilitating large data preprocessing on the FPGA side. The FPGA side of the SOM-TL437xF core board can support a maximum of 138 IOs.

(TL437xF-EVMevaluation board video introduction)

ZYNQ has no native LCD interface, making it impossible to connect to a display. Even if the LCD interface is expanded, the experience of the Qt interface and touch functionality is difficult to satisfy.

The SOM-TL437xF core board supports native LCD interfaces, using the system’s built-in Qt system (Qt-5.7.1), perfectly supporting touch functionality, and can also add HDMI circuitry to the baseboard to achieve HDMI output functionality.

ZYNQ has a main frequency of 667MHz (-1)/766MHz (-2)/866MHz (-3), and the 866MHz (-3) version chip is relatively expensive, with few customers using it in the market, and it is not easy to purchase.

The SOM-TL437xF core board’s ARM side has a main frequency of 1.0GHz, and also comes with 4 PRU units (similar to microcontrollers) for data co-processing.

ZYNQ is an SoC architecture, and traditional ARM and FPGA developers need to familiarize themselves with heterogeneous multi-core development frameworks and processes, which makes inter-core communication and ARM-FPGA communication development difficult. Even for experienced engineers, it takes considerable time to get familiar with.

The SOM-TL437xF core board has a discrete structure, with ARM and FPGA as independent chips, allowing developers to use traditional processes for development. Compared to ZYNQ SoC, the discrete structure clearly saves engineers’ time to familiarize themselves with the development process, making the development difficulty lower and speeding up product development time.

(Free trial application QR code)

Core board hardware documentation, user manuals, product specifications, etc. can be obtained by clicking the link below or scanning the QR code.

http://site.tronlong.com/pfdownload