• HPS + FPGA

Blink FPGA LED

Info

  1. This tutorial requires the Quartus software installed (version 18.1).
  2. You will need to use the white USB cable to program the FPGA (Type-B USB)!

In this tutorial, we will see how to interface the ARM with the FPGA fabric. I chose to let you follow the official Terasic tutorial Examples for using both HPS SoC and FGPA [Chapter 7], which can be found in the user manual on the kit's CD. For now, we won't create any custom hardware for the FPGA; we'll only work with the base example provided by the board manufacturer.

Execute

Remember to copy the compiled binary from the tutorial HPS_FPGA_LED to the SD Card, this include the .rbf and the HPS_FPGA_LED exeute file.

Understanding the Hardware

It's very important to stop and reflect on what happened. Here are some questions:

  1. What are the interfaces between the ARM and the FPGA? (there are 4 in total)
  2. What is the difference between them?
  3. What is Platform Designer (PD)?
  4. How does the HPS appear in Platform Designer (PD)?
  5. Did you open the HPS settings in PD? What can be configured?
  6. How is this interface used in Platform Designer?
  7. Why did the project use a clock bridge?