Aldec Adds ‘Bird’s Eye View’ Function to Growing Portfolio of ADAS FPGA-based Reference Designs

Aldec, Inc.  an industry leader in electronic design verification, is making available yet more support for automotive design engineers with the addition of an Advanced Driver-Assistance System (ADAS) ‘Bird’s Eye View’ reference design for its TySOM™-3-ZU7EV embedded development kit.

Bird’s Eye View is an embedded vision (EV) feature currently in high demand for ADAS as it provides a 360o surrounding view of the vehicle, as if seen from above. As a minimum the feature will assist drivers when parking but it also has the potential to play a role in obstacle detection and for providing lane departure warnings.

The reference design is available with Aldec’s TySOM™-3-ZU7EV embedded development kit and requires an FMC-ADAS daughter card and four fisheye cameras; also available from Aldec either separately or as part of Bird’s Eye View bundle.

“As with all our TySOM reference designs we’ve set out to save software and firmware engineers considerable design time and effort,” comments Radek Nawrot, Director of Operations at Aldec. “This allows them to take a building-block approach for some functions and to concentrate on integration issues and the crafting of higher-level functionality, which is where their skills are best employed and how they bring most value to their projects and companies.”

The Bird’s Eye View reference design makes the most of the Zynq device’s processing system (software) and programmable logic (firmware) parallel processing capabilities, and has six stages. These are: 1 – image capture (firmware), 2 – frame resize (software & firmware), 3 – lens distortion removal (software & firmware), 4 – perspective transformation (software & firmware), 5 – final image creation (firmware) and 6 – output to display and/or other ADAS systems (firmware).

The TySOM-3-ZU7EV features a Xilinx® Zynq® UltraScale+™ MPSoC device, which provides 64-bit processor (dual-core ARM® Cortex™) scalability while combining real-time control with soft and hard engines for graphics, video, waveform, and packet processing.

Aldec provides a HW/SW co-simulation solution for Zynq-based applications in the form of Riviera-PRO™, the company’s popular functional verification tool, when used in conjunction with open-source Quick Emulation (QEMU).

A full demonstration of the Bird’s Eye View will be given on Aldec’s stand (617) at Arm TechCon 2018; October 16th to 18th, San Jose Convention Center.

About TySOM-3 Embedded Prototyping Board

TySOM-3-ZU7EV is a compact prototyping board containing a Zynq® UltraScale+™ MPSoC device which provides 64-bit processor scalability while combining real-time control with soft and hard engines for graphics, video, waveform, and packet processing. Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZU7EV-FFVC1156 MPSoC contains a Video Codec Unit which supports H.264/H.265, and also has the biggest FPGA in the UltraScale+™ MPSoC family. This chip includes a Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 as an Application Processing Unit, Dual-core ARM Cortex-R5 as a Real-Time Processing Unit and ARM Mali-400 MP2 as a Graphics Processing Unit. TySOM-3-ZU7 is designed to assure flexibility in selecting peripherals because of leveraging all the features of the Zynq UltraScale+ ZU7EV-FFVC1156 MPSoC chip. This prototyping board contains 4 GB DDR4 Memory for the Programmable Logic (PL) and support DDR4 SODIMM Memory for the Processing System (PS). This board includes 2 Gb NAND Memory and supports up to 32GB of SSD storage in Micro-SD card. Communication and networking is enabled by ×2 Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth, CAN, Pmod, 4× USB 3.0, USB to UART Bridge, SATA and QSFP+ connector. Multimedia interfaces are provided using DisplayPort, HDMI IN/OUT. To expand the peripherals, 2× FMC (1× HPC and 1× LPC) VITA 57.1-2010 compliant are provided on the board. Thus, additional devices can be connected as FMC Daughter Cards that are provided by Aldec and other vendors.

About Aldec

Aldec, Inc., headquartered in Henderson, Nevada, is an industry leader in Electronic Design Verification and offers a patented technology suite including: RTL Design, RTL Simulators, Hardware-Assisted Verification, SoC and ASIC Emulation/Prototyping, Design Rule Checking, CDC Verification, IP Cores, Requirements Lifecycle Management, DO-254 Functional Verification, High-Performance Computing and Military/Aerospace solutions. www.aldec.com