This tutorial details the steps required for using Vitis to deploy an ARM Cortex-A9 firmware & software design on the ZedBoard hardware.

The aims of this tutorial are as follows :-

1. Setup hardware
2. Setup environment
3. Launch Vitis
4. Launch MiniCom terminal emulator
5. Deploy firmware & software on Zedboard
6. Improvements

Connect up the hardware as follows :-

1. Xubuntu PC USB ⇄ Zedboard USB JTAG/Debug
2. Xubuntu PC USB ⇄ Zedboard USB UART

Set the boot mode jumpers on the Zedboard for JTAG.

Setup Xilinx design environment for the 2021.2 toolset.

Launch Vitis IDE and specify the Workspace to use.

Open up a new terminal and launch the MiniCom terminal emulator.

To program the PL & PS part of the Zynq-7000 FPGA right click on leds_buttons under leds_buttons_system inside the Explorer tab and select Run As » Launch on Hardware (Single Application Debug) from the menu. The blue done LED will illuminate once the PL part of the FPGA has been programmed and after this the software will run on the PS part. All being well the Minicom terminal emulator will display the following output from the application.

This design can be improved by added debounce logic to the push button inputs as sometimes multiple interrupts are detected for a single button press due to switch bounce. Another improvement would be to make the GPIO2 register latch and hold logic 1's for each of the push buttons when they are pressed, these held values would then be cleared by software after an interrupt is detected and the GPIO2 register read. If there is a large delay between an interrupt being detected and the GPIO2 register being read the users finger will be off the push button so it will not be detected as pressed.