A hardware/software development environment for SoC-based time interval counters

The paper describes a design environment for development of precise time counters. The design was implemented in a System-on-Chip Zynq from Xilinx as an embedded solution with a custom user interface. The paper presents the system design, a dedicated time counter interface, and software running on the processing part of the Zynq device. It also contains the results of all system performance tests. The tests reveal the design advantages over the traditional approach, involving an FPGA device connected to a PC that serves as a host with a dedicated user interface. The presented development environment allowed reducing the calibration and measurement times twofold and threefold, respectively. Furthermore, thanks to the bus interface designed for data transmission from the time counter to the control module, the 200 MB/s data throughput inside the SoC was achieved.