Xilinx embedded hardware

Xilinx® FPGAs provide customizable silicon on top of which different kinds of hardware can be created. The Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK) provides tools to create custom embedded hardware on Xilinx FPGAs.

EDK consists of the following tools:

Xilinx Platform Studio (XPS): A graphical embedded hardware creation tool.
Embedded IP: A set of IP cores such as Ethernet MACs, UART controllers, and memory controllers that make it easy to interface to external peripherals.
Xilinx Software Development Kit (SDK): The Eclipse-based software development toolkit.

In a typical workflow, a hardware designer creates the embedded hardware using XPS. The hardware developer generates the Hardware Platform Specification file, which contains all relevant hardware information for the software developer. The software developer uses this information to create the software that runs on the embedded hardware platform.

Embedded hardware components
Hardware platform specification