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Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32

serd.es

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Re: Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32

#3

real quite high level sorry, most of your embedded projects going forward are MCU+fpga to do what? I thought a custom router but 284mbps isn't nearly fast for a network.

It's a good question. A lot of FPGA projects I see (including some real life products I've looked into recently) don't really need an FPGA. One I was asked to evaluate recently could easily have been done with a microcontroller with PWM outputs. The frequencies involved were well under 40MHz. Yes, there were a couple of multiplications going on in the FPGA, but there those could've been easily handled by a micorcontroller. An RP2040 would've sufficed instead of what they had - a microcontroller + an FPGA.

Re: Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32

#4

real quite high level sorry, most of your embedded projects going forward are MCU+fpga to do what? I thought a custom router but 284mbps isn't nearly fast for a network.

The intent is for the high performance datapath to live entirely in FPGA (and the project you're probably thinking of is switching, not routing).

The MCU is for control plane only. Several hundred Mbps between the control and data plane is more than enough for a SSH management CLI and poking registers on the FPGA to move a port to a different VLAN in response to a CLI command or add an ACL rule or something.

Re: Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32

#6

real quite high level sorry, most of your embedded projects going forward are MCU+fpga to do what? I thought a custom router but 284mbps isn't nearly fast for a network.

It's a good question. A lot of FPGA projects I see (including some real life products I've looked into recently) don't really need an FPGA. One I was asked to evaluate recently could easily have been done with a microcontroller with PWM outputs. The frequencies involved were well under 40MHz. Yes, there were a couple of multiplications going on in the FPGA, but there those could've been easily handled by a micorcontr…

The projects in question include things like a 48 port gigabit Ethernet switch with packet datapath in the FPGA, and dual 10/25G SFP28 uplinks. You're not doing that on a MCU. Also higher end oscilloscope work (e.g. 10 Gsps 12-bit JESD204B)

But a STM32 is more than sufficient for the management interface on both.

Re: Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32

#7
This is dope. I work with Zynq/Versal quite a bit and respect and understand (conceptually) the decisions you have made!

You get to own every aspect of your toolchain and with that will come a lot of power.

Are you familiar with:

https://github.com/corundum/corundum

Perhaps you can build a support package for your platform.

Re: Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32

#9

Neat! I love that H7 chip and its gargantuan inatruction manual... ...and you didn't even mention its 2nd core :)

H735 is one of the single core SKUs. Just a 550 MHz M7.

Would not surprise me if the M4 was there and fused off (i.e. same die as multicore H7 offerings), but it's not active.

Re: Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32

#10

real quite high level sorry, most of your embedded projects going forward are MCU+fpga to do what? I thought a custom router but 284mbps isn't nearly fast for a network.

It's a good question. A lot of FPGA projects I see (including some real life products I've looked into recently) don't really need an FPGA. One I was asked to evaluate recently could easily have been done with a microcontroller with PWM outputs. The frequencies involved were well under 40MHz. Yes, there were a couple of multiplications going on in the FPGA, but there those could've been easily handled by a micorcontr…

I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate how fast a modern "microcontroller" is. That 'H735 is probably faster than every computer I had up to and including the iBook G4 I until early 2009.
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