Building A Custom Zynq-7000 SoC Development Board From The Ground Up

I have a new post on Hackaday: Building A Custom Zynq-7000 SoC Development Board From The Ground Up.

The presenter starts by designing the power system, then makes progress on power, improves the schematic, integrates DDR RAM, adds USB PHY, Ethernet PHY, and SD card, starts on HDMI, makes progress on layout, makes progress on routing, continues with routing, configures with Vivado and estimates costs, receives PCBs and components, starts the PCB assembly, adds power rail components, adds core components, connects power and does initial programming, makes an LED blink, gets the ARM APU working, troubleshoots FT2232H to JTAG, resolves FT2232H to JTAG issue, adds UART and DDR, gets HDMI working, installs PetaLinux, and at long last configures USB and Ethernet in PetaLinux.

See AMD Zynq 7000 SoCs for specs from AMD. The executive summary is that this SoC includes an ARM Cortex-A9 Based APU and an Artix-7 FPGA (or a Kintex-7 FPGA on higher models). We suppose this is an opportune time to mention that in case you missed it Xilinx was recently acquired by AMD which is why you see the AMD branding now.

Summarizing references from these videos, other videos include What your Differential Pairs Wish You Knew and How to Achieve Proper Grounding by [Rick Hartley]; books referenced include Printed Circuits Handbook 7ed and Signal and Power Integrity Simplified 3ed; courses referenced include Mixed-Signal Hardware Design with KiCad and Advanced Digital Hardware Design from [Philip Salmony]; and software used includes EasyEDA, Vivado, Vitis IDE, and Tera Term.

Historical Figures from God Created the Integers

I made some notes about God Created the Integers by Stephen Hawking which I have been reading recently. I’m in the process of creating a new book teardown for it. I needed to make some notes about how to pronounce various names. I didn’t do this until I was half-way through the book though. If I had have taken the time to do this activity sooner I would have embarrassed myself less. Anyway. Better late than never!

New Book Teardown #5: Electrical Engineering 101 3rd Edition (2011) | In The Lab With Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

In this video I take a look at Electrical Engineering 101: Everything You Should Have Learned in School…but Probably Didn’t 3rd Edition written by Darren Ashby and published in 2011.

In the book the author mentioned that they used to write for chipcenter.com which appears to have since been taken over by EE Times. ChatGPT provided more information.

The author also mentioned Mathcad. I’m planning to check that out over here: https://www.mathcad.com/

And some terms which came up (ChatGPT explains further):

Vcc
Voltage at the collector
Vee
Voltage at the emitter
Vdd
Voltage at the drain
Vss
Voltage at the source

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)


Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Yum Cha 100pcs Releasable Cable OrganizerThis is an image of the product.

Let’s go shopping!