Embedded System Design with Microblaze for Newbie

A faster Reconfigurable system makes FPGA a prominent choice for a large set of applications, but Hardware alone is incomplete without smart software synchronizing all the events fruitfully to achieve the desired Application. This course covers fundamentals of Popular Xilinx drivers viz. UART, AXI Timers, UART16550, AXI GPIO, AXI BRAM, etc. The course also illustrates the usage of the AXI interrupt controller for handling Interrupts. Also to felicitate incorporation of  Hardware accelerators with Microblaze based design few examples on building Custom AXI Peripherals are also included. Software and Hardware Debugging, Profiling fundamentals are demonstrated with Microblaze to felicitate performance measurement.

The Microblaze is an FPGA-based Soft Processor capable of executing single instruction per cycle with few exceptions. The MicroBlaze interconnect is reconfigurable capable of communicating with a large set of peripherals to fit most of the medium-scale applications. It allows configuration of cache size, pipeline depth, peripherals, memory management unit, and bus interface suitable to fit different application requirements. As systems complexities are growing day by day, Microblaze will play central role in the non-Zynq based FPGA families whereas it will be the best light-weight alternative working in tandem with the Zynq hard processor for Zynq and Ultrascale based FPGA families.