MicroZed DMX-Carrier

Abstract

The MicroZed DMX-Carrier can host one MicroZed module and has connectors for up to 22 DMX512 ports using am XC7Z020 MicroZed board or up to 18 DMX512 ports when using an XC7Z010 MicroZed board. The carrier is also equiped with four PMOD headers. Each of the PMOD headers can also drive up to 2 DMX512 ports, which adds 8 more DMX512 ports. Or the PMOD ports can be used to connect buttons, displays, ADC's or other gadgets. The bitstream nessesary to drive the FPGA logic can be generated with the open source FPGA synthesis tool Symbiflow. There are five connectors to attach up to five DmxIo4 boards and one connector to attach a DmxIo2 board.

The MicroZed board is a cpu-module that hosts an XC7Z010 or XC7Z020 also known as the ZYNQ, which is a Xilinx SoC-FPGA. An SoC-FPGA containing an FPGA fabric that is tied closely to an SoC. In this case it is a XILINX Series 7 FPGA connected to an SoC containing two ARM Cortex A9. The benifit is the connection of the two, that is much more complex than the average posibilities you have connecting a standard FPGA to a standard SoC. They are connected via four 32bit AXI4 connections, two of them are masters and two of them slaves on the FPGA side. On top of that the FPGA has one cache coherent 64bit high speed AXI master thru the cpu cache and two high speed 64-bit AXI masters into the core memory crossbar.

The FPGA fabric enables a very flexible device and makes it possible to use it to create the "swiss army knife" of DMX512. It can be used to create a mixed booster, merger and network dmx-node out of this.

This board contains no power-supply sollution on purpose, as the power consumption is not clear. Xou can simply use a 3.3V LDO if you only have two DMX-ports connected or use a powerfull DC-DC module if nessesary.