In laboratory 1 you will design a system-on-chipⁱ using the Xilinxⁱ development suite and targeted at the XUPⁱ development board. Your design will contain a MicroBlazeⁱ soft-processorⁱ, a serial port, and three GPIOⁱ devices. The processor will be connected to the serial port and GPIOⁱ peripherals in a shared-bus architecture. You will then program this system-on-chipⁱ, using the C programming language, to print out your name five times to the screen of a desktop computer which is connected to the XUPⁱ development board using the serial port.

In this laboratory your system-on-chipⁱ design will consist of three major components:

1. A MicroBlazeⁱ soft-processorⁱ
   The MicroBlazeⁱ will be the processor in your system-on-chipⁱ design. The program that you design in this laboratory will be compiled to the MicroBlazeⁱ ISAⁱ and then executed by the processor that you instantiate within your design. Compilation is done inside of the Xilinxⁱ development suite and makes use of the GCC compiler contained within.
    
2. A serial port
   The serial port in this system-on-chipⁱ design provides communication between the XUPⁱ development board and the desktop computer connected to it. In this laboratory your program will print out a message by sending characters one at a time from the XUPⁱ to the desktop computer. These characters will be received on the desktop computer and printed out to the screen.
    
3. Three GPIOⁱ devices
   The three GPIOⁱ devices in your system-on-chipⁱ design will control the LEDⁱ, push button, and DIP switch peripherals contained on the XUPⁱ development board. In this laboratory these hardware peripherals will not be used by the software program, however, in future laboratories these peripherals will be used and it is beneficial to learn how to instantiate them in your system-on-chipⁱ design.

Before you begin this laboratory we suggest that you become familiar with the Xilinxⁱ development suite. Please read the Introduction to EDK, Base System Builder, and XPS Interface tutorials before you begin. 

Project Assignment

1. Use the base system builder to create a basic system-on-chipⁱ
2. Create a software project and make it print out your name five times
3. Synthesize your system-on-chipⁱ, compile your software project, and combine them into a bitstream
4. Download your bitstream onto the XUPⁱ development board and execute it

This may not seem like much, but, at the end of this laboratory you will have created a system-on-chipⁱ and executed a program on top of it in a bare metal environment. This represents a very basic but fully functional embedded system.

Project Directions

The directions for completing this project can be found on the Laboratory 1 Directions page. This page contains step-by-step directions on how to build your system-on-chipⁱ design and software application. Additionally, there is a screencast of the entire project which shows how the project is completed.

It will be to your benefit to either print out the project directions or to have the project directions page open while you are doing this laboratory.

Project Questions

1. What is an FPGAⁱ?
2. What is a system-on-chipⁱ? Why is it different from your desktop computer system?
3. What does soft-core IP mean?
4. What is are MHS, MSS, and UCF files?
5. What does it mean to cross-compile a program?
6. Why does it take so long to build the HW portion of your system?
7. How does the desktop computer program the FPGAⁱ, how does it monitor the FPGAⁱ?