Newbie,the simplest way to program an FPGA at home?

Hi,

If you can find the serial configuration devices for your FPGA (try Mouser and Digikey, they are usually better than Farnell and RS), use them.

Otherwise, use either a microcontroller or a CPLD. Of course you'll need development tools for them as well.

Regards,

Sebastien

many thanks, i'm oriented to use an SPI serial EEPROM,it looks that in this way viathe jtag i will be able to program it,correct?Perhaps it would need a bit of time more than a parallel device,but it looks much simpler

at home i have

1)a Cyclone Pro programmer,but the micro i'm using in this moment(9s12E64,80 pin )doesn't allows to program an external flash through the BDM 2)a jtag digilent programming cable 3)some scraped xc95144 xilinx cpld how could i use it in the bes way possible(or, i must say ,in the more convenient way possible)?

i would to know how to program a flash through a generic microcontroller without passing through BDM or JTAG ports,please,can you suggest me a link?

Thanks once more

Since you have the Digilent JTAG cable, you can use Xilinx ISE/iMPACT to directly program both Xilinx CPLDs and FPGAs, using the JTAG pins of the chips.

-Dave Pollum

Hi Blisca

If you want to use SPI anyway, why not use SD-cards (or MMC) to store the configuration data. You can (re)write these with any PC that has a card reader and the small ones come really cheap. About the implementation look at

There's a project that uses a CPLD for booting FPGAs from Flash-Cards.

have a nice synthesis Eilert

1. The simplest way to program a Xilinx fpga is to hook it up to a Xilinx configuration prom. The xc18v01 can be programmed via jtag which can then program the fpga. You don't have to write any code since impact programs the prom.
2. You might be able to cross connect to the prom on your Spartan board if it is big enough.
3. Someone posted to this group about using a couple of gates to trick an spi eeprom into programming an fpga. You would still have to program the spi eeprom somehow, either by using a programmer or writing one.

Alan Nishioka

Hi there, if you want to learn VHDL why not focus on the VHDL and forget about getting it working on the FPGA hardware. Download Xilinx Webpack and Xilinx Modelsim starter edition(free), write some vhdl, and then simulate it to check you understand. Iterate. You can also synthesis it with webpack to check out if it gives you the gates and flops you were expecting. Stick to some sensible design rules and then the later jump to the FPGA hardware becomes trivial.

-Keep your design synchronous, use as few clocks as possible, preferably one. (and only use one edge)

-Don't gate the clock

-Register any asynchronous inputs

I suppose that approach is not as much fun as playing around with actual hardware though.

Cheers Andrew

Thanks for good hints Andrew

2 years ago i started to learn VHDL by myself at home,but i need to touch by hands things to print it in my mind,so as an exercise i tried to implement a basic digital oscilloscope as exercise i used only scraped components a Lattice CPLD ,an Atmega32 MCU and a 640x 480 LCD display from an early laptop Now i would like to redo the same path with a bigger FPGA ,and a freescale 9s12 MCU this is that "thing" that i built,strangely it works,i added read out and cursor to have something looking like a measurement g

notice the jungle of enameled branch connecting the 5 ns SRAM end the A/D to the CPLD ,and the anti-crush bars soldered over the Ic's Of course it is at educational level,i didn't faced hardly with problems like skew and glitches,but i considered it an interesting experience.