An Architecture Study on a Xilinx Zynq Cluster with Software Defined Radio Applications
Abstract
The rapid rise in computational performance offered by computer systems has greatly increased
the number of practical software defined radio applications. The addition of FPGAs to these
flexible systems has resulted in platforms that can address a multitude of applications with
performance levels that were once only known to ASICs. This work presents an embedded
heterogeneous scalable cluster platform with software defined radio applications. The Xilinx
Zynq chip provides a hybrid platform consisting of an embedded ARM general-purpose
processing core and a low-power FPGA. The ARM core provides all of the benefits and ease of
use common to modern high-level software languages while the FPGA segment offers high
performance for computationally intensive components of the application. Four of these chips
were combined in a scalable cluster and a task assigner was written to automatically place data
flows across the FPGAs and ARM cores. The rapid reconfiguration software tFlow was used to
dynamically build arbitrary FPGA images out of a library of pre-built modules.
Collections
- Masters Theses [19687]