Antmicro's Open-Hardware HDMI Breakout Gives Microchip's PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit an HDMI Output
Designed to connect to the Raspberry Pi-compatible GPIO header, the board gives the Icicle a video output while leaving the PCIe slot free.
Microchip's PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit, a Linux-capable development board that combines processor cores based on the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) with a highly-capable field-programmable gate array (FPGA), now has an open-hardware option for video output: Antmicro's HDMI Board.
"Experimentation and architectural research aside, the PFSoC [PolarFire SoC] is just a great FPGA SoC with a powerful CPU and 23-461K LUTs. Video and sound processing, machine learning accelerators, extremely flexible smart interface bridges are the areas where it will really shine, especially with the current advances in the open FPGA IP core ecosystem that we are contributing to," explains Antmicro. "The Icicle board will be of great use in prototyping products that require custom hardware and IP, which we can then turn into dedicated boards with a custom gateware design and BSP."
"To expand the Icicle’s functionality we have designed and built a dedicated HDMI breakout board that connects to the boards RPi [Raspberry Pi-compatible] expansion header which can be used e.g. to display a Linux-driven UI or other graphical content. The board is available on GitHub today and joins a range of Antmicro’s boards that constitute a modular and flexible hardware ecosystem developed as part of our internal R&D and customer projects. With experience in creating custom hardware as well as software, our engineers can rapidly develop dedicated baseboards, systems and entire products based on the PolarFire SoC platform."
The HDMI add-on gives the PolarFire SoC its missing HDMI output, and makes the board an all-in-one development kit for those looking to experiment with Linux and other kernels and operating systems on a RISC-V system. It also comes alongside full support for the PolarFire SoC in Renode, Antmicro's open source simulation platform — meaning developers can get started even without the hardware in-hand.
More details on the HDMI Board are available on Antmicro's blog; sources for the board can be found on GitHub under the permissive MIT License.
