Hello World

In this exercise, users will be introduced to two tools that are used heavily in WARP development: the Xilinx Platform Studio (XPS) and the Software Development Kit (SDK). Users will use these tools to construct a simple "Hello World" software project that prints messages via UART to a terminal running on the user's PC.

First, we briefly describe the tools that will be used in this exercise.

Xilinx Platform Studio (XPS)

Simply put, XPS is the tool that lets you connect your own custom FPGA designs to the custom constraints of the WARP v3 hardware. It also lets you draw from a library of Xilinx-provided peripheral cores (known as pcores) to use in your design. For example, to use the Ethernet hardware on WARP v3, the XPS project you use will need to instantiate an Ethernet MAC peripheral. For our designs, we use the Tri-Mode Ethernet Media Access Controller (TEMAC) to accomplish this. Also, XPS lets you instantiate a processor for running custom software known as MicroBlaze. To write code for MicroBlaze, a different tool known as the Software Development Kit (SDK) is used.

Software Development Kit (SDK)

The SDK will look very familiar to users who are comfortable with the ​Eclipse IDE