External Memory Protection on FPGA-Based Embedded Systems

A work by: Joćo Carlos Resende ; Aleksandar Ilic and Ricardo Chaves

Contacts:

joaocresende@tecnico.ulisboa.pt

aleksandar.ilic@inesc-id.pt

ricardo.chaves@tecnico.ulisboa.pt

Page created 06/09/2024

Last Modified 06/09/2024

 

This is a web page for support material regarding the publication of the article: External Memory Protection on FPGA-Based Embedded Systems published on 27th Euromicro Conference Series on Digital System Design (DSD), August 2024.

In this work, a memory pipeline bridge between an embedded CPU and external DDR memory was created on a Zynq-7100 (see Figure below).

The purpose of this bridge is to provide a testing template for memory access latency through FPGA, with an adjustable size for the intermedium pipeline.

A diagram of a computer system

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Figure 1: Overall view of the Memory bridge

 

Besides the memory bridge itself, Performance Counters are also included tapping the AXI4 transmissions on both sizes of the bridge.

These counters account how many write/read transmissions have been performed and make a histogram of how many FPGA clock cycles those transmissions took.

A diagram of a bus

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Figure 2: Circuit for creating a transmission histogram by clock cycle

 

 

 

The following link contains a fully assembled Xilinx Vivado and Vitis 2020.2 project of the memory bridge, alongside separate source files (vhdl and C codes) and instructions for assembly from scratch.

Memory_Bridge_project