Feature Overview

The SDSoC™ environment inherits many of the tools in the Xilinx® Software Development Kit (SDK), including GNU toolchain and standard libraries (for example, glibc) for the ARM CPUs within Zynq®-7000 devices, as well as the Target Communication Framework (TCF) and GDB interactive debuggers, a performance analysis perspective within the Eclipse/CDT-based GUI, and command-line tools.

The SDSoC environment includes system compilers (sdscc/sds++) that generate complete hardware/software systems targeting Zynq-7000 devices, an Eclipse-based user interface to create and manage projects and workflows, and a system performance estimation capability to explore different "what if" scenarios for the hardware/software interface.

The SDSoC system compilers employ underlying tools from the Vivado Design Suite (System Edition), including Vivado® HLS, IP integrator, IP libraries for data movement and interconnect, and the RTL synthesis, placement, routing, and bitstream generation tools.

The principle of design reuse underlies workflows you employ with the SDSoC environment, using well established platform-based design methodologies. The SDSoC system compiler generates an application-specific system on chip by customizing a target platform. The SDSoC environment includes a number of platforms for application development and others are provided by Xilinx partners. TheIntroductiondescribes how to capture platform metadata so that a pre-existing design built using the Vivado Design Suite, and corresponding software run-time environment can be used to build an SDSoC platform and used in the SDSoC environment.

An SDSoC platform defines a base hardware and software architecture and application context, including processing system, external memory interfaces, custom input/output, and software run time including operating system (possibly "bare metal"), boot loaders, drivers for platform peripherals and root file system. Every project you create within the SDSoC environment targets a specific platform, and you employ the tools within the SDSoC IDE to customize the platform with application-specific hardware accelerators and data motion networks connecting accelerators to the platform. In this way, you can easily create highly tailored application-specific systems-on-chip for different base platforms, and can reuse base platforms for many different application-specific systems-on-chip.