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===A little bit of history===
At the time of this writing (October 2013) Xilinx is migrating from mature ISE 14.x Design Suite - that should be the last series of this suite - to the new Vivado environment. Both are composed by several programs and some of these are in common. From the general standpoint, the main difference between ISE and Vivado - even if ISE does support Zynq - is the the latter has been expressively conceived to support newer SOC architectures such as Zynq, besides traditional FPGAs. Thus, adopting Vivado as the default environment for BELK would seem the natural choice. However, the migration process mentioned above has just begun and the majority of application notes and reference designs released by Xilinx still refers to ISE suite. Plus Vivado is still a little bit "green" and several bug fixes and improvements are introduced by every new release.
Since Bora was presented in 2013 and because this product addresses long longevity markets such as industrial and biomedical, DAVE chose to build BELK upon Vivado that undoubtedly represents today the future of Xilinx development environments.
→Logical structure of Bora Embedded Linux Kit (BELK)
==Logical structure of Bora Embedded Linux Kit (BELK)==
To understand the structure of BELK, it is necessary to describe the basic organization of Xilinx Vivado Design Suite/Xilinx SDK and to recall briefly the recent history of development tools provided by Xilinx.
===A little bit of history===
At the time of this writing (October 2013) Xilinx is migrating from mature ISE 14.x Design Suite - that should be the last series of this suite - to the new Vivado environment. Both are composed by several programs and some of these are in common. From the general standpoint, the main difference between ISE and Vivado - even if ISE does support Zynq - is the the latter has been expressively conceived to support newer SOC architectures such as Zynq, besides traditional FPGAs. Thus, adopting Vivado as the default environment for BELK would seem the natural choice. However, the migration process mentioned above has just begun and the majority of application notes and reference designs released by Xilinx still refers to ISE suite. Plus Vivado is still a little bit "green" and several bug fixes and improvements are introduced by every new release.
Since Bora was presented in 2013 and because this product addresses long longevity markets such as industrial and biomedical, DAVE chose to build BELK upon Vivado that undoubtedly represents today the future of Xilinx development environments.
===Structure of BELK reference designs===
Generally speaking, this parts - in the binary/sinthesized form - are combined together in one monolithic file that is stored in a non-volatile memory such as SPI NOR flash. Generating this file is quite easy as described by Vivado documentation. However in real world products, this may be too rigid because developers may want to handle these parts separately and independently.
===Basic structure of Vivado Design Suite and integration into BELK===
Vivado/SDK (1) can be viewed as a collection of programs required to deal with all of the development aspects related to Xilinx components (software running on ARM cores, FPGA fabric verification and programming, power estimation etc.). These include strictly FPGA-related tools such as Floorplanner and pure-software development tools such as SDK.