Creating the Workspace

We start by launching the Vitis Unified IDE. From the Starting Page we select the ‘Open Workspace’ option.

In the dialog window that opens, we select the folder where our Vitis Workspace and Projects will be stored. We then click the ‘Ok’ button on the bottom right corner of the dialog window to confirm our changes.

The Vitis Inified IDE will relaunch from the folder we entered, and the Starting Page will be shown again. Now we are ready to create our Platform Component.

Creating the Platform Component

We select the ‘Create Platform Component’ option in the ‘Embedded Development’ section, which launches the ‘Create Platform Component’ dialog window.

The ‘Create Platform Component’ window consists of four sections: Name and Location, Flow, OS and Processor, and Summary.

In the Name and Location section we enter a name for our platform component and the folder where it will be stored.

In the Flow section we’ll add a hardware design in the form of an XSA file exported by Vivado. We can use the ‘Browse’ button to search for our custom hardware design, however, the Vitis Unified IDE includes hardware designs for several development boards, including the Zedboard, which is the one we’ll use. So in this case we can select ‘zed’ from the drop-down menu.

In the OS and Processor section we can specify which operating system (Linux, standalone) we’d like to use, and on which processor (MicroBlaze, ARM R, ARM A) the OS will run. We want to use a standalone OS running on the A9 with boot components, so we won’t make any changes on this section.

Finally, the Summary section shows all the settings for our Platform component in one page. After reviewing this information we click ‘Finish’ on the lower right corner of the ‘Create Platform Component’ window. Vitis will then start generating the Platform component.

Creating the Application Component

After the Platform component has been generated, we can create our application. We’ll use the ‘Hello World’ application from the examples included in Vitis.

After selecting the Hello World application from the examples list, the ‘Create Application Component – Hello World’ window is shown. The Create Application Component consists of four sections: Name and Location, Hardware, Domain, Sysroot (for Linux systems) and Summary.

In the Name and Location section we enter the name of our application project and the folder where it will be stored.

In the Hardware section we select the Platform Component that we created earlier. Since our component only supports a standalone OS, the Sysroot section dissapears when we select it.

In the Domain section we can either select the domain that was created by default with our Platform Component, or we can add a new domain. Here we select the existing domain.

Finally, the Summary section shows all the settings for our Hello world Application component in one page. After reviewing this information we click ‘Finish’ on the lower right corner of the ‘Create Application Component’ window. Vitis will then start generating the Application component.

Building and Debugging the Application

After the Application component has been generated, we run the Build step from the Flow section on the lower left corner of the Vitis window. This will generate the executable files for our application.

We can start debugging by running the Debug step from the Flow section on the lower left corner of the Vitis window. Vitis will connect to our board and launch a debug session. We can then step through the code running on the A9 processor in real time.

Cheers,

Isaac