Most of our designs include an FPGA that is connected on the processor's external bus; in the following examples, FPGAs have been used in a different or unconventional way.

ZP Engineering develops on all the main families of FPGAs: Altera, QuickLogic, Xilinx.

FPGA-based designs

2D Array Controller

This extensive project has been developed to control a 2D array of emitters, up to 400,000 individual outputs, each driven by a 12-bit PWM generator.
The design has been partitioned into small daisy-chained array modules. Up to 6000 modules are driven by multiple serial bitstreams, generated by a remote controller.

The controller is driven by a NetSilicon processor (running uClinux) that accepts new data from a host through an Ethernet connection, or directly by means of a dedicated 1 Gbps link generated by a custom PCI card inserted into the host.

ZP Engineering has participated to the specifications phase, the architectural definition, design of all hardware and FPGA parts, development of embedded firmware, host-side drivers, host software to test and control the whole system.

Customized USB Scanner for dual images

By inserting a FPGA between the path from a commercial USB scanner controller and the interface to sensors and lamps, a specialized dual-sensor scanner has been implemented; it has been possible to use the same drivers and software of the original configuration by recreating all relevant signals on FPGA. Signal generation is fully reprogrammable by means of simple, USB-based commands.

4 million gates FPGA board

This demanding design has been completed in record time. It's a highly configurable development platform for telecom algorithm development, based on two high-density Xilinx Virtex-II FPGAs (2 million gates each, housed in fine-pitch BGA).
The following peripherals and interfaces are provided: two ARM Integrator -compatible expansion slots, two 100-Mbit Ethernet interfaces with MII connectors, USB interface, SDRAM interface (with 168-pin DIMM socket), a complete AFE channel for ADSL applications, an i960 bus connector for external testing. X-ray ispection has been included in the assembly activity.

Testing of the system has been finalized using an external IEEE-1284 host interface (not shown in the picture); dedicated VHDL code has been developed for testing and exercised within a Tcl-based command shell. This approach proved to be highly effective in the debug stage, allowing simple scripts to be written on the fly to test specific parts of the board.