Dev board offers maker-focused processor-plus-FPGA performance

Mouser now stocks the Arty Z7 development board from Digilent. The board helps designers build a range of motor control and embedded vision systems on a ready-to-use development platform with Arduino Uno and Digilent chipKIT-compatible headers, Digilent Pmod connectors, and USB and HDMI ports. The board is designed around the Xilinx Zynq-7000 AP SoC, which integrates a dual-core 650MHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Xilinx’s seven-series FPGA logic to offer to a powerful processor with a unique set of software-defined peripherals and controllers. The board features a 1Msps ADC, DDR3 memory controller with eight DMA channels, high-bandwidth peripheral controllers via 1-gigabit Ethernet, a USB 2.0, and a SDIO. Low-bandwidth peripheral controllers are also available for SPI, UART, CAN, and I2C protocols. The board ships with 512Mbytes of DDR3 memory with a 16-bit bus operating at 1050Mbits per second and 16Mbytes of Quad-SPI flash memory with factory-programmed 48-bit globally unique EUI-48/64 identifier. The board also offers 53,200 lookup tables, 106,400 flip-flops, 630Kbytes of block RAM, four clock management tiles, and 49 inputs/outputs (I/Os). The processor is programmable from JTAG, Quad-SPI flash, and microSD card.