To evaluate your enhanced MIPS processor, a Pynq-Z1 board (reference manual), will be used.

The Pynq board

On this board, there's a Zynq-7000 SoC chip (reference manual), which is divided into two distinct subsystems:

The Pynq board overview

  • The Programmable Logic (PL), which includes an array of programmable logic blocks and a set of dedicated resources (e.g., block RAM memories for dense memory requirements, DSPs for high speed arithmetic, analog-to-digital converters)
  • The Processing System (PS), whose key components include:
    • hard silicon ARM Cortex-A9 processors
    • clock generators
    • DDR and memory controllers
    • I/O peripherals (e.g., GPIO, UART)
    • PS-PL connectivity interfaces.