3.1. Architecture

The Mango 802.11 MAC/PHY design supports operation as a Linux wireless NIC on Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC devices. The hardware architecture is illustrated below.

Fig. 3.1 Linux design hardware architecture

The 802.11 PHY and radio interface are implemented in the PL (FPGA fabric). The MAC software runs in the hard ARM R5 CPUs in the PS RPU subsystem. Linux runs in the high-speed ARM cores in the PS APU section.

The software architecture illustrated below.

Fig. 3.2 Linux design software architecture

The Upper MAC and Lower MAC are implemented as bare-metal applications, each running in a dedicated R5 CPU in the RPU. The mango_wlan kernel module implements the 802.11 driver which interfaces to the kernel’s mac80211 framework and networking stack. The mango_wlan driver interfaces to the kernel as a standard wireless NIC driver supporting all applications that work with standard Wi-Fi NICs.