FPGA Fun

I'm playing with a FPGA starter kit board and decided to blog about my learning process. I got the board from Jared at Sharebrained, thanks! The board I have is a Spartan-3 Board from Digilient. It has a Xilinx FPGA on it. It also came with a JTAG-USB cable which could end up be useful with other projects?

First step is to get a dev environment set up so I can upload example code.

Contents

1 The steps are:

The steps are:

Getting drivers for the JTAG cable
Finding the compiler which will generate the binary
Finding an example to run which will work with my board
Uploading the example

Getting the drivers

Grab the drivers for the JTAG-USB cable here. This also contains the software you need to load binaries onto the board. It is called Adept. This is painless as long as the USB hub you are plugging into is actually powered on. ;)

Finding the compiler which will generate the binary

Download the WebPack from here. This is a slightly painful process that requires an account with Xilinx and a lot of harddrive space. But after it is installed it is no big deal.

Finding an example to run which will work with my board

There's a good tutorial here.

It's for an older version, but it is close enough to figure out the newer version. Just do section one, then in ISE select the project and in the processes pane, just run the "Generate Programming File" task.

Uploading the example

Finally, use Digilent Adept to upload the .bit file that is generated to the PROM. QED!

Random stuff I've learned:

The User Constraint File is the mechanism that maps the pins you define in VHDL to the pins on your board.
VHDL is a dataflow language (like PD!) which will take a little while to wrap my head around.

Next up, VGA output!