B E L K Q u i c k S t a r t G u i d e
v . 1 . 0 . 9
2.4.1
Logical structure of BORA/BORAX Embedded Linux Kit
(BELK)
To understand the structure of BELK, it is necessary to
describe the basic organization of Xilinx Vivado Design
Suite/Xilinx SDK and to recall briefly the recent history of
development tools provided by Xilinx.
2.4.1.1 A little bit of history
At the time of this writing (October 2013) Xilinx is migrating
from mature ISE 14.x Design Suite - that should be the last
series of this suite - to the new Vivado environment. Both are
composed by several programs and some of these are in
common. From the general standpoint, the main difference
between ISE and Vivado - even if ISE does support Zynq - is the
latter has been expressively conceived to support newer SOC
architectures such as Zynq, besides traditional FPGAs. Thus,
adopting Vivado as the default environment for BELK would
seem the natural choice. However, the migration process
mentioned above has just begun and the majority of application
notes and reference designs released by Xilinx still refers to
ISE suite. Plus Vivado is still a little bit "green" and several bug
fixes and improvements are introduced by every new release.
Since BORA was presented in 2013 and because this product
addresses long longevity markets such as industrial and
biomedical,
DAVE Embedded Systems
chose to build BELK
upon Vivado, that certainly represents today the future of
Xilinx development environments.
2.4.1.2 Basic structure of Vivado Design Suite and integration
into BELK
Vivado/SDK
can be viewed as a collection of programs
required to deal with all of the development aspects related to
Xilinx components (software running on ARM cores, FPGA
fabric verification and programming, power estimation etc.).
2
The Software Development Kit (SDK) is the Xilinx Integrated Design Environment for creating embedded
applications on Zynq™-7000 All Programmable SoCs. SDK is the first application IDE to deliver true
homogeneous and heterogeneous multi-processor design and debug, it is optionally included with the Vivado
Design Suite or ISE Design Suite, or available as a separate free download for application developers.
March, 2016
17/66
