Specifications

40 www.xilinx.com Embedded System Tools Guide (EDK 6.2i)

1-800-255-7778 UG111 (v1.4) January 30, 2004

Chapter 2: Xilinx Platform Studio (XPS)

System Tab

This tab is one of the four tabs that appear on the left in the XPS window in Figure 2-2. The

system tab shows the system in a tree format. There are three sub-trees in this view:

x The System BSP tree shows system components (various cores) by their instance

names. Each core can have its own sub-tree which displays information

corresponding to that instance (for example base address and high address). Source

and header files corresponding to a processor are listed in the sub-tree for that

processor instance.

x The Project Files tree shows the MHS. MSS, PBD, UCF and other files corresponding

to the project. Users can double-click on any of the file names to open it in the XPS

main window. Some of these files must be created by the user in order to implement

the design.

x The Project Options tree shows the current value set for various project options.

Users can double-click or do a Right-click on any of the fields shown in this tree to

bring up the

Set Project Options dialog box.

Applications Tab

This tab shows all user software application projects. Users can create a number of

software application projects that are associated with the processors in their design.

A software application project consists of a unique project name, a set of source and header

files that the users can create to design their application. The source files can be built into

executables (one executable per application project) that can be downloaded onto the

FPGA.

If users have multiple applications, but the current design is only going to require a subset

of those applications, they should mark the other applications as “Inactive”. XPS engine

will ignore all the “Inactive” applications. This enables users to preserve software

applications and does not force them from deleting those applications.

Each active application project can be specified with a set of compiler options. A right click

on the application projects tree view brings up a context menu. The menu items can be

invoked to set compiler options, view files, open files, associate different processors with

the project and so on. Each project can also be marked for initialize BRAMs. If a user

application resides completely in BRAM memory and the user wants to download that

ELF file as part of the bitstream, then those applications must be “Marked to initialize

BRAMs”. XPS will use data2mem to update the bitstream with those ELF files.

For every processor in the design, an application project called <processor

instance>_bootloop is created by default. This is a predefined bootloop that can be

downloaded to the BRAMs so that the processor is in a valid state on wakeup. A View

Source on the bootloop project will open the source file with more comments explaining

the importance of the bootloop. For more information please see the Software Application

Management Section of this chapter.

Transcript Window (Output)

The transcript window is the bottom window in Figure 2-2. This window acts as a console

for output, warning and error messages from XPS and from other tools invoked by XPS.