Xilinx UG133 manual Introduction, Guide Contents

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About This Guide

Introduction

This user guide contains information on how to integrate the stand-alone, prebuilt, MicroBlaze Microcontroller reference design into an FPGA. Although this design is targeted initially for the Xilinx Spartan-3 Starter Kit Board, the design may be modified readily for any Xilinx or third party platform.

This guide is an aid in getting started and learning how to use the Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK) tools. It does this through examples, which show how multiple software images can be run on a defined soft Microcontroller hardware configuration. This guide show how an FPGA with a soft processor can be used the same way an engineer would select an off the shelf microcontroller. This guide will provide examples of a number of different microcontroller configurations from which an engineer can choose. The soft microcontroller features and peripherals in the FPGA may be used without modification, or may be modified and customized using the Xilinx EDK Platform Studio tools. This guide will cover the flow where multiple software images are load on an unmodified hardware configuration.

The MicroBaze Microcontroller is an integrated solution intended for implementation of an embedded controller in FPGA by a user without extensive knowledge of the Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK) and the Xilinx Platform Studio (XPS). The solution offered in this document is a minimal implementation that can be expanded easily to include other peripherals and application software for different usage.

All the necessary documentation, references, HDL code, sample codes, software drivers and application software are included in the tools or provided with this design.

Guide Contents

This manual contains the following sections:

“Microcontroller Reference Design Overview”

“MicroBlaze Microcontroller Reference Design Number 1”

MicroBlaze Microcontroller Ref Des User Guide www.xilinx.com 1

UG133 January 7, 2005