Embedded System - Embedded System - 2026.1 English - UG1504

Versal Adaptive SoC System and Solution Planning Methodology Guide (UG1504)

Document ID
UG1504
Release Date
2026-07-22
Version
2026.1 English

An embedded system comprises the embedded processor in Versal devices. It includes acceleration logic built into the following hardware components:

  • Traditional programmable logic (LUTs, block RAMs, UltraRAMs, DSPs)
  • Versal drivers
  • Bare-metal/Linux BSPs
  • PetaLinux/EDF/Yocto tools

For Versal devices, the embedded compute system comprises the processing system with application processors and real-time processors. For this design type, the use models can vary. They range from a sophisticated embedded software stack to a simple bare-metal stack. The programming of the hardware units requires the bare-metal stack for support.

An embedded system design runs a software stack on the built-in embedded processor. This processor serves as an overall control plane for the kernels running on the acceleration units. The flexible runtime (XRT) application programming interfaces (APIs) manage data transfer between the embedded processors and Versal devices. These APIs also have function calls for managing the hardware units. For more information, refer to the XRT and Vitis Platform Overview in the XRT Documentation .

Note: XRT is a value-added software layer on top of the Linux system software that provides a specific acceleration programming model. The Vitis hardware tools sit on top of Vivado. Like Vivado, Vitis supports lower-level traditional embedded software programming through the standard hardware handoff and drivers.
Figure 1. Embedded System