Antmicro's FastVDMA Brings Open HDMI Capabilities to the Snickerdoodle FPGA Platform

Open silicon specialist Antmicro has demonstrated how its Fast Versatile Direct Memory Access (FastVDMA) IP can be used to add an open HDMI output to cores running on the Xilinx Zynq FPGA-based Snickerdoodle platform, providing a route to wholly-open Linux-capable devices with full graphical interfaces.

Open processor IP, like RISC-V and OpenPOWER, have been steadily growing in popularity — but the processor makes up only part of a modern computing system, especially one powerful enough to run desktop Linux. Last year Antmicro made a step towards opening up more of the platform with the release of FastVDMA, and now the company is demonstrating how it can be used with additional hardware to bring HDMI video outputs to the Snickerdoodle FPGA system-on-module (SoM).

"Apart from FastVDMA, we used Antmicro’s open source AXI Display Controller, HDMI Transmitter, and Mixed-Mode Clock Manager to create an FPGA design that added a graphics functionality to the Zynq-based Snickerdoodle SoM," the company explains in its write-up. "The setup also involved our open source HDMI breakout board designed for Snickerdoodle’s breakyBreaky, and required developing dedicated Linux drivers. To verify the design, our engineers successfully ran a Linux desktop environment (no HDMI demo is complete without an Antmicro-themed wallpaper).

"FPGA SoCs that can run Linux, such as Zynq or Microchip’s RISC-V capable PolarFire SoC, are popular among developers, as they allow system designers to build various hardware-optimized but user-friendly devices, including powerful machine learning accelerators, smart interface bridges or video and sound processing devices. With the dedicated HDMI boards we have built for both the Snickerdoodle and the PolarFire Icicle kit that allow them to output a GUI, those FPGA SoC systems feel much more like a real computer."

"Also pure FPGA systems can run Linux these days using the multi-core Linux-capable and FPGA-optimized VexRiscv CPU," Antmicro adds, "with a variety of I/O options offered by the LiteX soft SoC ecosystem that we heavily contribute to — thus blurring the line between FPGAs and 'hardened' SoCs."

More details are available on the company's blog post, while the source code for the project — including the FastVDMA, HDMI, AXI, and LiteX cores - can be found on the company's GitHub repository with full instructions for its use.