EDK

EDK, or Embedded Development Kit, is Xilinx's former integrated toolchain for building embedded systems on Xilinx FPGAs and SoCs. It combined hardware design and software development into a single workflow, supporting processors such as MicroBlaze (a soft CPU) and PowerPC cores embedded in Xilinx devices. The kit was part of the Xilinx design ecosystem and was commonly used to implement custom processors alongside user peripherals for applications ranging from control systems to embedded Linux.

The hardware portion was built with Xilinx Platform Studio (XPS), where designers configured the processor core, memory interfaces, buses, and peripheral IPs. The EDK then generated a hardware platform description and a bitstream. The software portion was developed in the Xilinx Software Development Kit (SDK), an Eclipse-based IDE. SDK used a generated Board Support Package to compile C/C++ (and assembly) applications, debug on hardware or via simulators, and deploy software to the target processor. EDK supported both standalone and Linux-based software execution, with deployment options including bare-metal binaries or Linux images via the built hardware platform.

Lifecycle and status: EDK was widely used in the 2000s and early 2010s as part of the ISE Design Suite. Over time, Xilinx introduced newer embedded flows and, with the transition to the Vivado Design Suite and later Vitis, EDK functionality was deprecated and is no longer maintained for current devices. Existing designs from that era remain executable on legacy toolchains but are not recommended for new development.

See also: MicroBlaze, PowerPC, XPS, SDK, ISE Design Suite, Vivado, Vitis.