Mini PCIe Module Delivers Compact FPGA Mezzanine Solution

The AcroPack APZU-300 developed by Acromag is a Mini PCIe (mPCIe) module built around AMD’s Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC (see figure). The MPSoC interfaces with the host via a x1 PCI Express lane.

Integrated into the MPSoC is a dual-core Arm Cortex-A53 for applications and a dual-core Arm Cortex-R5 for real-time support. Media support includes Arm’s NEON media-processing engine. The FPGA provides 154k programmable logic cells.

A 100-pin field I/O connector exposes MPSoC peripherals. Different versions provide a mix of interfaces, including Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, and a UART. The module adds 54 MB of QSPI flash memory along with 2 GB of LPDDR4 DRAM. It also has a bootable MicroSD card slot.

The module is supported by AMD’s Vivado development environment. Acromag also provides an engineering design kit (EDK). The EDK includes FPGA-generated firmware examples that provide host access to the hardware digital I/O on the module. Windows, Linux, and VxWorks capabilities are available from Acromag.