ZyEHW

ZyEHW is a joint hardware-software project for evolutionary design in the Xilinx Zynq-7000 all programmable (AP) system-on-chip (SoC). The name ZyEHW is a concatenation of the first two letters of Zynq and the acronym for evolvable hardware (EHW).

ZyEHW is the result of our ongoing research and intends to demonstrate our scientific results. Some of these results were already published (you can find a list of related publications in this file). ZyEHW does not contain the descriptions of our developed methods. Please read our papers if you want to find out more about our methods.

Currently, ZyEHW is able to evolve image filters only. Our intention is to include more case studies in the near future.

Who can benefit from ZyEHW?

1. If you are interested in image filtering then you can create by ZyEHW a complete hardware system for evolving image filters. Image filters are evolved based on the provided training data (video sequence) and no knowledge of conventional image filtering is required for setting up such a system. The hardware will evolve image filters autonomously (without human intervention). The documentation of ZyEHW will guide you how to achieve this but read our papers for more background information.

2. If you want to know how to create your own evolvable hardware system then you can analyze and reuse our codes (see our licensing).

3. If you are interested in partial reconfiguration at very low-level then you can learn how to do reconfiguration of look-up tables. This kind of reconfiguration is faster than the one supported by PlanAhead and Vivado.

4. If you want to know how to use Xilinx Vivado for developing complex hardware systems then you can find our scripts for the automated use of this tool.

Contact us if something is not clear and want a more detailed explanation (for example more comments somewhere in the code). If you find ZyEHW useful then it would be a nice way to support us by citations to our papers.

Installing and using ZyEHW

We recommend to follow the instructions in the README.md files (each folder has one). The best way to learn ZyEHW is visiting the folders and reading the instructions in the following order.

1. Folder hw contains instructions and the source code for generating the hardware configuration, i.e. the configuration bit stream for the programmable logic of Zynq-7000 AP SoC.

2. The software for the processor cores of Zynq-7000 AP SoC are in folder sw.

3. Software tools for preprocessing test inputs and postprocessing test outputs can be found in folder tools.

System requirements

1. Development board with Zynq-7000 AP SoC. ZyEHW was tested on a Zedboard. You will need to connect your board with your computer and setup a serial terminal program. Please read the Zedboard Getting Started Guide in order to learn how to do that.

2. The latest version of Xilinx Vivado Design Suite. Please read the product documentation for installing and setting up the software. A free Xilinx product license should be sufficient for this project.

3. We recommend to use Linux. ZyEHW was tested in Centos 6.5 running in Virtualbox.

4. Our pre- and postprocessing tools require ffmpeg for video processing. Other dependencies include gcc, make, libxml2 and libtiff.

Related publications

1. R. Dobai, L. Sekanina: Low-Level Flexible Architecture with Hybrid Reconfiguration for Evolvable Hardware, In: ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems, vol. 8, no. 3, art. no. 20, 2015.

2. R. Dobai, K. Glette, J. Torresen, L. Sekanina: Evolutionary Digital Circuit Design with Fast Candidate Solution Establishment in Field Programmable Gate Arrays, In: 2014 IEEE International Conference on Evolvable Systems, 85-92, 2014.

3. R. Dobai: Evolutionary On-line Synthesis of Hardware Accelerators for Software Modules in Reconfigurable Embedded Systems, In: 2014 24th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), 2014.

4. R. Dobai, L. Sekanina: Image Filter Evolution on the Xilinx Zynq Platform, In: 2013 NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems, 164-171, 2013.

5. R. Dobai, L. Sekanina: Towards Evolvable Systems Based on the Xilinx Zynq Platform, In: 2013 IEEE International Conference on Evolvable Systems (ICES), 89-95, 2013.

Contact

You can contact me if you have any questions. My contacts are available on my web page.

License

Copyright (C) 2014 Roland Dobai

ZyEHW is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

ZyEHW is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is available in file COPYING. Further informations about the license can be found on the GNU licenses web page.