Introduction

The SDx™ environment is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for implementing heterogeneous embedded systems using Zynq®-7000 All Programmable SoCs and Zynq UltraScale+™ MPSoCs. The SDx IDE supports both the SDSoC (Software-Defined System On Chip) and SDAccel design flows on Linux and only SDSoC flows on Windows. The SDSoC system compiler (sdscc or sds++) generates an application-specific system-on-chip by compiling application code written in C or C++ into hardware and software that extends a target platform. The SDx IDE includes platforms for application development; other platforms are provided by Xilinx partners. This document describes how to create a custom SDSoC platform starting from a hardware system built using the Vivado® Design Suite, and a software run-time environment, including operating system kernel, boot loaders, file system, and libraries.

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 SDx environment IDE targets a specific hardware platform, and you employ the tools within the SDx environment IDE to customize the platform with application-specific hardware accelerators and data motion networks. 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.