FPGA Development

Experience with FPGA types

We develop designs for all common FPGAs, often using SoCs.

FPGA - System on Chip (SoC)

FPGA SoCs are available with Hard-IP in the form of ARM cores or as soft cores. In both cases, the systems can be expanded with your own peripherals and thus adapted to the respective problems.

ARM-Hard-IP

Both Altera/Intel and Xilinx offer FPGAs with integrated ARM microcontrollers. These already have an extensive range of peripherals, such as:

  • Ethernet
  • USB
  • SPI
  • I2C
  • CAN

Self-developed peripherals can be connected via the AXI interface. With clock frequencies of 800 MHz, they offer high performance. Linux usually runs on these SoCs.

vivado

MICROPROCESSOR Soft-IP

For many FPGAs, microcontrollers are available as Soft-IP. These run at a significantly lower clock rate, but can be expanded with peripherals provided by the manufacturer or developed in-house. As the AXI bus is also used here, simple migration between hard and soft cores is possible. A bare-metal application usually runs on the soft cores.

"Timing not met" ...?

Even strict adherence to all synchronous design rules does not guarantee that the timing closure will be achieved. Sometimes you still receive error messages or warnings such as "Timing not met". Additional pipelining stages provide a remedy. We have extensive knowledge of how to improve the timing on the various FPGA types.