Tutorial T7: Designing with Xilinx SDSoC

With the advent of smarter systems and the drive towards `The Internet of Things', increasing the connectedness of people and things, most new products now leverage SoC-based platforms which allow companies to bring products to market faster, increase system-level efficiency and, most importantly, allow for continuous innovation and product differentiation. Design teams must choose carefully how to differentiate their products while still meeting ever increasing market requirements and stringent cost targets to maximize return on investment. True platform differentiation relies on a combination of both new software features as well as novel hardware features. Given the requirements to bring products to market faster that are truly differentiated at all levels, tools and environments are needed that enable both the software and hardware differentiation to be done with the completeness and ease of use found in a traditional embedded C/C++ application development environment but without compromising on architecture or performance. Introduction to SDSoC: The Zynq SoCs and MPSoCs are natural fit for design teams consisting of software and FPGA hardware engineers. Teams with limited or no hardware resources however have been challenged due to the RTL (VHDL or Verilog) development expertise needed to take full advantage of the benefit of the device. To resolve this challenge and enable more design teams to take advantage of Zynq devices, Xilinx has introduced SDSoC
<sup>TM</sup>
, a new C/C++ development environment. The third member of the Xilinx® SDx
<sup>TM</sup>
family of development environments, the SDSoC development environment enables the broader community of embedded software developers to leverage the power of hardware and software `all programmable' devices. The SDSoC Development Environment accelerates development of Zynq SoCs and MPSoCs in two ways. First software developers can get started sooner over a traditional hardware/ software development flow by leveraging Xilinx, 3rd party or end user platforms. Second, SDSoC eliminates the churn between hardware and software teams typically required to take advantage of programmable logic as software accelerators, truly accelerating overall system development.