To get the most out of this book

You need to have familiarity with digital electronics in general and, specifically, you need to have some fundamental knowledge of modern logic design at a RTL using a hardware design language such as VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog. You will also need some working knowledge of embedded programming using a high-level language such as C or C++ and have some experience using cross-compilers to build executables for a target embedded processor. The hardware design flow and the embedded software design flow both use tools packaged within the Xilinx Vivado and Vitis environments. You will be guided through their installation processes on your host machine. If you are running a Windows operating system on your host machine, you will be guided through installing VirtualBox, which is an Oracle hypervisor to host a Linux guest operating system to be used as your development host operating system.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
Xilinx Vivado 2021.2 or a higher version	Windows Enterprise and Professional 10.0 Or Window 10 HE and VirtualBox Or Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS up to 20.04.1 LTS
Xilinx Vitis	Windows Enterprise and Professional 10.0 Or Window 10 HE and VirtualBox Or Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS up to 20.04.1 LTS
VirtualBox	Windows 10

All the required installation steps are described in detail in the book using a simple, logical step-by-step approach that will get you up and running with the tools. Simply follow the instructions and don’t skip any steps during the installation process. Also, make sure you perform the required configuration when indicated to do so, so the tools are ready to use without wasting time debugging issues that are sometimes hard to track if a step in the installation or configuration process has been skipped or omitted.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

If you can get hold of a Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC board, this will be great as you can download the FPGA bitstream and the executable software to the board and perform debugging and profiling on the real hardware. Nevertheless, if you don’t have access to a Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC board, you can still use a virtual target within the Xilinx tools to debug and interact with the executable software running on the virtual target.