FPGA-specific terms are defined in the canonical PandABlocks glossary in the meta-panda docs. Common terms used across this repo:
- App
- A collection of block instances specified in an
.app.inifile that can be built into an FPGA image (an.ipkpackage) and loaded onto a PandABlocks device. - Block
- A piece of FPGA logic with a number of field instances that performs calculations each FPGA clock tick. May be a soft block (e.g. SEQ) or have hardware connections (e.g. TTLIN).
- Field
- An input, output, or parameter of a block.
- Module
- A directory containing block definitions, logic, simulations, and timing. Modules typically contain a single soft block definition, or a number of hardware blocks tied to a particular target platform, SFP, or FMC card.
- PandABox
- A PandABlocks device manufactured by Diamond Light Source and SOLEIL. Schematics on Open Hardware.
- PandABlocks device
- A Zynq 7030-based device loaded with the PandABlocks rootfs and firmware.
- Target platform
- The physical Zynq-based hardware (e.g. PandABox, Picozed Carrier) that is loaded with firmware to become a PandABlocks device.
- Zpkg
- A specially formatted tar archive of built files that can be deployed to a
PandABlocks device (legacy pre-5.0 format; replaced by opkg
.ipkpackages from 5.0 onwards).