Introduction

The SDSoC™ (Software-Defined System On Chip) environment is an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for implementing heterogeneous embedded systems using the Zynq®-7000 All Programmable SoC and Zynq UltraScale+™ MPSoC platforms. The SDSoC environment provides an embedded C/C++ application development experience with an easy to use Eclipse IDE, and comprehensive design tools for heterogeneous Zynq SoC development to software engineers and system architects. The SDSoC environment includes a full-system optimizing C/C++/OpenCL compiler that provides automated software acceleration in programmable logic combined with automated system connectivity generation. The application programming model within the SDSoC environment should be intuitive to software engineers. An application is written as C/C++/OpenCL code, with the programmer identifying a target platform and a subset of the functions within the application to be compiled into hardware. The SDSoC system compiler then compiles the application into hardware and software to realize the complete embedded system implemented on a Zynq device, including a complete boot image with firmware, operating system, and application executable.

The SDSoC environment abstracts hardware through increasing layers of software abstraction that includes cross-compilation and linking of C/C++/OpenCL functions into programmable logic fabric as well as the ARM CPUs within a Zynq device. Based on a user specification of program functions to run in programmable hardware, the SDSoC environment performs program analysis, task scheduling and binding onto programmable logic and embedded CPUs, as well as hardware and software code generation that automatically orchestrates communication and cooperation among hardware and software components.

The SDSoC environment 2017.1 release includes support for the ZC702, ZC706, MicroZed, ZedBoard and Zybo development boards featuring the Zynq-7000 AP SoC, and for the ZCU102 development board featuring the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC. Additional platforms are available from partners. For more information, visit theSDSoC development environment web page.