How to send data/program to the memory of a Spartan 3 starter kit board

If you are talking about the EEPROM or any other non-volatile on-board memory, it should be detected by Impact. Just create an PROM file (.mcs) from the .bit file and load it into the memory. All of this can be done inside impact and should be detailed in the user manual for your board.

---Matthew Hicks

If, on the other hand, you have a picoBlaze or MicroBlaze for which you want to update the memory, the Spartan3E Starter Kit has that ready to go. Source code is available.

Thank you very much for your help.

But I want to load data/program into the SRAM of that board, do you know how can I do that?

Thanks again.

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Thank you very much for your help.

But I want to load data/program into the SRAM of that board, do you know how can I do that?

Thanks aga> If, on the other hand, you have a picoBlaze or MicroBlaze for which you want

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Please look at the Spartan3E Starter Kit webpage

where, under the _Documentation_ heading you'll find the User Guide and the Reference Designs. The reference design includes a PicoBlaze with a memory loader that has both Verilog (or perhaps VHDL) source and an external utility to load the memory dynamically. The Picoblaze assembler will also generate a file that can be used as INITs in your BlockRAM instantiation. The JTAG related updates should be the same for Spartan3 as it is for the

3E.

There are other memory-only update tools from Xilinx that might be easier. Search the Xilinx site (or Answers Database) for "coe" which is the memory file formate used for post-compiled memory updates.

Are you referring to the on-chip block RAM or the attached SDRAM on the sp3e board?

John_H wrote:

What I normally do is create a simple circuit that can read a hex file (either Intel format or Motorola S Record, but more often my own simplified format) from the serial port and then just use the "send text file" option in Hyperterminal on the PC. After that is finished I download the actual circuit to the board. Since this is SRAM the contents won't be lost while the FPGA is being programmed (in practice even DRAMs tend to keep their data long enough).

I don't have such a circuit ready for the Spartan 3 starter kit, but I tried following the instructions in

worked just fine for me. Here you have a small monitor program in the block RAM which allows you to load stuff from the serial port, so the same design downloads to memory and then uses the content unlike what I suggested above.

-- Jecel