Software development for embedded systems has become simple and therefore a very common task. It gets another dimension if the embedded system offers reconfigurable logic capabilities, because these so called hardware/software codesigns cause design space explorations. In this lab we want to teach students how to get used of the capabilities of hardware software cosystems. The tasks issue from one of the three following main topics:

• software development close to hardware
• VHDL component development
• interface design between hardware and software

In the first meeting we will discuss organizational questions. Topics will be:

• forming groups
• task selection and assignment
• create schedule (milestones, talks etc.)

We plan to offer a strong and powerful hardware/software co-development ecosystem to attendees of this lab.
This hardware/software co environment consists of two development boards connected by PCI-Express.

For the software development part we provide the APM86290 Evaluation Kit - "Serengeti"

• 1.5 GHz dual-core APM86290 processor
• 2GB DDR3-1333 ECC Memory
• two 10/100/1G Ethernet ports, two SATA-II ports, two USB ports
• three PCI-Express connectors
• linux 2.6.32

We want to use the XUPV5-LX110T board (http://www.xilinx.com/univ/xupv5-lx110t.htm) for hardware development

• Xilinx Virtex®-5 XC5VLX110T
• PCI-Express, SFP (1000Base-X), SMA (RX and TX Differential Pairs), etc.
• 64-bit wide, 256-MB DDR2 SODIMM
• etc.

• ML505/ML506/ML507 Evaluation Platform User Guide (http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/boards_and_kits/ug347.pdf)
• ML505/ML506/ML507 Reference Platform User Guide (http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/boards_and_kits/ug349.pdf)
• Xilinx ISE User guides (http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/dt_ise13-2_userguides.htm)
• APM 86290 Data Sheet
• Serengeti User Guide
• The Designer’s Guide to VHDL (Peter J. Ashenden)
• VHDL-Cookbook (Peter J. Ashenden)
• VHDL-Kompakt (Andreas Mäder)[german]