Imagine if we could combine the benefits of Raspberry PI microprocessors, Arduino microcontrollers and the programmable logic of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) in a single development platform? What if we could connect all of these components together with high speed interconnect and add lots of programmable, high-speed IO? That would be quite the embedded development dream machine! Things would be even more exciting if we could integrate all of the parts into a single programmable system-on-chip.
But wait … hardware, without good software, is just scrap metal! We need to program the machine with a user-friendly programming language with hundreds of thousands of libraries, so that we would not have to re-write code for problems that we know have already been solved. And since this is a wish-list for our dream machine, we should make sure to include libraries for machine learning and data science because these are some of the hottest areas that we want to explore.
This workshop will introduce PYNQ, based on Xilinx programmable System-on-Chips. PYNQ serves up a browser-based, integrated development environment (IDE) for Python, so that new users can experience the power of Xilinx platforms without having to install new software, or create their own FPGA hardware designs. Meanwhile, PYNQ makes experienced developers more productive and helps them to create, document, and distribute their designs, more effectively.