User Design Flows

The SDSoC environment is a tool suite for building efficient application-specific systems-on-chip, starting from a platform SoC that provides a base hardware and target software architecture including boot options.

The figure below shows a representative top-level user visible design flow that involves key components of the tool suite. For the purposes of exposition, the design flow proceeds linearly from one step to the next, but in practice you are free to choose other work flows with different entry and exit points. Starting with a software-only version of the application that has been cross-compiled for ARM CPUs, the primary goal is to identify portions of the program to move into programmable logic and to implement the application in hardware and software built upon a base platform.

The first step is to select a development platform, cross-compile the application, and ensure it runs properly on the platform. You then identify compute-intensive hot spots to migrate into programmable logic to improve system performance, and to isolate them into functions that can be compiled into hardware. You then invoke the SDSoC system compiler to generate a complete system-on-chip and SD card image for your application. You can instrument your code to analyze performance, and if necessary, optimize your system and hardware functions using a set of directives and tools within the SDSoC environment.

The system generation process is orchestrated by thesdscc/sds++system compilers through the SDSoC IDE or in an SDSoC terminal shell using the command line and makefiles. Using the SDSoC IDE orsdscccommand line options, you select functions to run in hardware, specify accelerator and system clocks, and set properties on data transfers (for example, interrupt vs. polling for DMA transfers). You can insert pragmas into application source code to control the system mapping and generation flows, providing directives to the system compiler for implementing the accelerators and data motion networks.

Because a complete system compile can be time-consuming compared with an "object code" compile for a CPU, the SDSoC environment provides a faster performance estimation capability. The estimate allows you to approximate the expected speed-up over a software-only implementation for a given choice of hardware functions and can be functionally verified and analyzed through system emulation. The system emulation feature uses a QEMU model executing the software and RTL model of the hardware functions to enable fast and accurate analysis of the system.

As shown in the preceding figure (User Design Flow), the overall design process involves iterating the steps until the generated system achieves your performance and cost objectives.

It is assumed that you have already worked through the introductory tutorials (seeIntroduction) and are familiar with project creation, hardware function selection, compilation, and running a generated application on the target platform. If you have not done so, it is recommended you do so before continuing.