Mastering MicroBlaze

Within many FPGA you will find a MicroBlaze processor doing some of the heavy lifting for communication, register / IP configuration or house keeping. Without these processors, our jobs as FPGA designers would be even more complex.

In this hands-on workshop we are going to create, develop, and deploy a MicroBlaze solution that will work in any Xilinx 7 series device or newer.

Topics Covered

• Why do we need sequential processing in a parallel world?
• Overview of MicroBlaze variants
• MicroBlaze architecture
• Working with memories and caches
• Interfacing with peripherals
• Clock and interrupts
• Operating systems - Bare Metal / FreeRTOS / Petalinux
• Multi-processor communication – Communication between MicroBlaze
• Boot and configuration of MicroBlaze
• Networked communications

Requirements

• A Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA SP701 Board will be used as the primary example in this workshop, however Digilent Arty-A7 or Arty-S7 boards are also suitable options
• AMD-Xilinx Vitis 2021.2 or later