Xilinx 11.4 on Fedora 12; Playing with Spartan 3e starter kit

A few months ago I was at the Mexico city airport waiting for my flight departure and to kill time I went to look at magazines shop and found a Linux Journal with an article that cough my eye “Bere-Metal hacks with fpga programming” Marco Fioretti

article describes some FPGA basics covering Xilinx design tools, so I give a try to use Xilinx suite using an target platform a Spartan3e starter kit.

Xilinx suite does a better job than Altera Quartus software, installation is simpler not to mention that far less workarounds to get the environment setup and running; I found Gorge’s wiki a well document procedure to install Xilinx tools plus installing an alternative Jtag driver. The next steps are a simplification to get everything working under Fedora 12.

1. Get Xilinx suite.

Go to http://www.xilinx.com/support/download/index.htm and get the full DVD suite or the Web installer client as you prefer; I downloaded the full suite `Xilinx_11.1_ISE_DS_SFD.tar`

2. Untar

tar xf Xilinx_11.1_ISE_DS_SFD.tar

3. Run the installer script

./xsetup

4. Install Jtag driver

Install dependencies

sudo yum -y install fxload libusb-devel

Get source code for alternative usb-driver

git clone git://git.zerfleddert.de/usb-driver

Build the driver

cd usb-driver

make

Copy the driver to a place that Xilinx tools can find it.

cp libusb-driver.so /opt/Xilinx/11.1/common/lib/lin64/

Copy udev rules and Jtag firmaware

cd /opt/Xilinx/11.1/common/bin/lin64/install_script/install_drivers/linux_drivers/pcusb/

sudo cp xusbdfwu.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

sudo cp *.hex /usr/share/

Reload udev rules *Only needed the first time

sudo udevadm control –reload-rules

5. Create a setup-xlnx script and add the next lines

#!/bin/sh

# Xilinx Webpack 11.1

XILINX_BASE=”/opt/Xilinx”

XILINX_VERSION=”11.1″

DISPLAY=:0

source ${XILINX_BASE}/${XILINX_VERSION}/settings64.sh

source ${XILINX_BASE}/${XILINX_VERSION}/ISE/settings64.sh

source ${XILINX_BASE}/${XILINX_VERSION}/EDK/settings64.sh

# No need to preload usb library if you installed in a location

# where xlnx tools can find it

#export XIL_IMPACT_USE_LIBUSB=0

#export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libusb-driver.so

# Optional Xilinx license definitions, if you have access to them

#export XILINXD_LICENSE_FILE=”2100@pcdesign;X:\licenses\Xilinx.lic”

#export LM_LICENSE_FILE=”2100@pcdesign;X:\licenses\Xilinx.lic”

6. Open a terminal and source the setup-xlnx script

source setup-xlnx

7. Optionally run the xilinxupdate utility to get latest updates

xilinxupdate

8. Start playing with Xilinx tools

ise – hdl design

xps – system integration

xps_sdk – software development environment

impact – programming tool

9. Programming the FPGA

Once a you complete an hdl design you need to generate a bitstream file to program the FPGA the tools also crates a script that can be used to automate the programing process just run

impact -batch <project-path>/etc/download.cmd

10. Continue learning

I have found in youtube several tutorial for hdl design using Xilinx tools even complete courses thanks to several Indian institutes of Technology