Introduction to SoC+FPGA

In this talk, Marek introduces the increasingly popular single-chip SoC+FPGA solutions. At the beginning, Marek lists the diverse chip offerings from multiple vendors, ranging from the smallest IoT-grade solutions all the way to large industrial-level chips. Software is what makes the difference though, which is the central part of the talk. Marek first goes through the various RTOS-level solutions often used on the smallest systems, quickly moving toward the bigger chips running the usual suspects, U-Boot and Linux. Mainline U-Boot and Linux support for SoC+FPGA solutions is quite complete and already deployed in production. Marek presents the support for loading and operating the FPGA part from U-Boot prompt on both Intel and Xilinx solutions. Linux recently gained support for the FPGA manager, which allows loading the FPGA bitstream into the FPGA, yet to fully leverage the potential of the FPGA manager in combination with Device Tree (DT) Overlays, patches are still needed. Marek explains how the FPGA manager and the DT Overlays work, how they fit together and how to use them to obtain a great experience on SoC+FPGA solution with Linux, while pointing out various pitfalls.