An “ASSP-like” S/W-driven programming environment for Zynq chips, Xilinx promises
In terms of its development environments, this – the SDSoC Development Environment for All Programmable SoCs and MPSoCs – is the third “targeted” member of the company’s SDx family of development environments, the previous two being centred on software-defined networks and on implementing acceleration.
In the hardware dimension, Xilinx recently extended the Zynq family of devices from “SoC” to an uprated “MPSoC” generation, adding multi-core ARM processors on-chip, among other increments. (See story here.)
With this development environment introduction, Xilinx says it has provided the assistance to designers that they need to fully exploit the SoC devices. Within it, you can take a “whole system” approach, in which the tools will assist with partitioning your design effectively, profiling the task, identifying bottlenecks, creating accelerated function blocks and migrating them to the programmable fabric so that the tasks most appropriate to software run on the embedded cores, and that best handled in programmable logic, is located there. Also included is a new measure of automation of interconnecting those functional blocks once you have determined their optimum partitioning. Automation extends to “instrumenting” the code in the system to carry out profiling, and to verify performance once development has progressed.
Xilinx notes, however, that the automation has been kept controlled; recognising that most complex designs will involved significant re-use, the user can decide what to keep unchanged from prior work. The SDSoC development environment enables, Xilinx says, the “broader community” of embedded software developers to leverage the power of hardware and software ‘all programmable’ devices. The SDSoC environment provides a simplified ASSP-like programming experience including an Eclipse integrated design environment (IDE) and a comprehensive development platform for heterogeneous Zynq All Programmable SoCs and MPSoCs. With the sector’s first C/C++ full-system optimising compiler, SDSoC delivers system level profiling, automated SW acceleration in programmable logic, automated system connectivity generation, and libraries to speed programming. It also enables end user and 3rd party platform developers to rapidly define, integrate, and verify system level solutions and enable their end customers with a customized programming environment.
Used by systems and embedded software engineers, SDSoC provides an Eclipse IDE with C/C++ running on bare metal or operating systems such as Linux and FreeRTOS as its input. SDSoC enables the creation of complete heterogeneous multi-processing systems, including reuse of legacy HDL IP Blocks as C-callable libraries. Unlike traditional separate hardware-centric and software-centric flows, which can result in development delays and uncertainty in system architecture and performance, SDSoC is architected to provide rapid system profiling, SW acceleration in programmable logic, and system architecture exploration in a familiar framework.
SDSoC supplies a full system optimising compiler targeting both the ARM processors and the programmable logic. SDSoC is designed to enable software teams to rapidly configure, generate macro and micro architectures with automated system connectivity generation. The result, Xilinx believes, will be optimal system connectivity and memory interfaces, and rapid system exploration of performance, throughput, and latency with short design iteration times.
Building on the software profiling found today in the Xilinx SDK, which enables software-hardware performance measurement of a completed design running on a Zynq platform, SDSoC adds rapid system performance estimation. Using the rapid system performance estimation, users can specify which functions should be accelerated in programmable logic and SDSoC instruments the C/C++ code to report software cycles and estimates for the data transfer as well as overall application speedup. This enables early and rapid generation and exploration for optimal total system performance and power.
SDSoC provides Board Support Packages (BSP) for Zynq All Programmable SoC-based development boards including the ZC702, ZC706, as well as third party and market specific platforms including the Zedboard, MicroZed, ZYBO, and Video and Imaging development kits.
Xilinx; www.xilinx.com/sdsoc
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