ZYBO Smart Car

The ZYBO Smart Car was developed by Digilent China. It is one of the items in the Zrobot line, the educational kit solely developed by Digilent China. The smart car is powered by the Digilent ZYBO that features Xilinx Zynq technology. Users can control the robot from an Android phone using the Bluetooth interface within 20m. The OS is Linux. Users can develop the software and Linux driver using Xilinx Vivado.

History of the FPGA

As you probably know, one of Digilent’s major focuses is producing FPGA (field programmable gate array) boards and educating the public on FPGA design. One of the classes I was in last semester focused on FGPA design. This class is EE324 at WSU, which is taught by Digilent’s own Clint Cole. He gave a background lecture on the History of FPGA chips. Not only was it an extremely interesting lecture, but it also helped me understand the huge leaps in logic design that have been made since the 1960s. This is the history that led to the development of FPGA chips. The chips are the parts that Xilinx makes that we use on our FPGA boards.