Building a simple LAB environment to implement and examine the HSL concepts explained throughout this course 1
is the main concern of this section. 2
These are the software and hardware components that we need in this course. A laptop or desktop computer 3
with a USB port. 4
A Basys3 evaluation board and a micro-USB cable to connect that to the computer 5
And the Xilinx Vivado-Hlx toolset. 6
I have tried to keep this list simple. Therefore, a large group of students, researchers and hobbyists 7
can build the lab and learn the exciting concepts of HLS. 8
However, if you have other Xilinx boards, still you can follow the course only with minimum modifications 9
in the constraints file in the Vivado Design Suite before generating the final FPGA bitstream file. 10
All you need is installing the Xilinx Vivado-HLx on your computer 11
and connect the Basys3 board to it. Now you are ready to dive in and design hardware with the HLS approach. 12
To make sure that you have a proper setup, this section gives you the big picture of the environment, 13
the relationship between components, and guides you through the installation steps. 14
This section consists of five lectures. 15
This lecture introduces the section. The next lecture will explain some of the features available by 16
the Xilinx Vivado-HLx toolset and give you a big picture of the tool usage. 17
More details of each step in synthesising a code in Voivado-HLx are explained in Lecture three. 18
In Lecture 4, we will download the toolset from the Xilinx web site and install that on our PC or 19
laptop. 20
Finally, the last lecture will explain how to test the lab environment to make sure it is ready to 21
be used throughout the course.