Introduction

Last week you have started exploring the software/hardware co-design. The last Hands-on gave a first impression of how such designs are created. But how do hardware and software communicate with each other?

In this chapter we will have a look at the AXI standard communication interface for hardware design. You will go through some important communication protocols. We also learn how to handle Interrupts/Polling to see if data is being received.

As a last part of this chapter we have a look at the PYNQ Framework from Xilinx, which is a python based framework to easily create embedded designs.

To conclude we will examine:

• Dual Port Memories and how to generate and initialize them in Vivado.
• How does a VGA signal get converted to HDMI?