Porting UHD to Xilinx ZCU111

Question

I have a Xilinx ZCU111 board and I want to deploy an open source eNB (LTE base station) stack from srsRAN on it.

Is it possible to port UHD to ZCU111? If possible, how can I do it. If not, is there any other way to implement it?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It is possible -- the USRP X410 uses the same FPGA (XCZU28DR). However, it's a lot of work. You'd have to start by cloning the OE environment of the X410 (from here) and merging it with the embedded environment Xilinx provides (or maybe the other way around).

You also need to modify the FPGA and MPM (a mostly-written-in-Python daemon that runs on the hardware) to match the hardware. This includes stuff like controlling the reference clock sources. In MPM there's a file called x4xx.py which is the basis of the X410 MPM support, I'd start by cloning and modifying that.

On the FPGA, you should stick to the USRP repository for an FPGA design, but you'll have to rewrite the constraint files and DTS files from scratch, unless the pinouts of the ZCU111 and X410 overlap significantly. You might want to start with a design that doesn't contain any radios to start with.

UHD may not require all that many modifications (relative to all the rest). However, you probably want to make up a a faux productd ID that UHD recognizes, although you could also re-use the X410 product ID, given that most of the controls live on the device anyway (in MPM, which you will have already modified).