Design and Implementation of an FPGA Based System on Chip (SoC) For Embedded Control Application

FPGAs offer a great prototyping medium for complex digital systems. FPGAs focus on the hardware implementation of digital systems where the circuit is specified in a Hardware Description Language (HDL) like Verilog or VHDL. Verilog coding, debugging and verification takes time. To save time and also implement efficient and high performance FPGA based systems, the system can be divided into software tasks running on a softcore processor (coded in HDL) and delegating the high performance application specific tasks to hardware accelerators (hardware tasks). This technique is termed as Hardware / Software Codesign. It speeds up design of FPGA based systems because a small subset of highly specific tasks need to be coded in HDL and the rest of the application is easily handled by the Software running on the softcore processor. This paper represents design and implementation of an FPGA based System on Chip (SoC) consisting of a Xilinx PicoBlaze soft processor core interfaced with HDL coded hardware modules. The design is extensible and more modules can be integrated in future to incorporate highly specialized hardware tasks. The system has been implemented on a Spartan 6 based FPGA board.