Programming Virtex II Pro Eval Board

Hi, I hope someone would be able to help me with my issue. I have a Xilinx Virtex II Pro Eval board from Avnet. The board has a serial interface to program it. I bought a Serial to USB Converter cable from RadioShack to try to program the FPGA from Impact. I have had no luck in doing this so far. Impact doesn't recognize the cable and it always fails. Can someone point me on how would I be able to program the FPGA with the Serial-USB Converter cable?.

Ram.

Reply to
ramakrishnan.vijayakumar
Loading thread data ...

My guess would be that you need a special driver/software to do the programming because it would take an application aware middle device to convert from USB to the boards programming interface.

---Matthew Hicks

Reply to
Matthew Hicks

You can't; the serial port is a debug console for the embedded processor.

To program the device, you need a Xilinx-compatable JTAG adapter.

GH

Reply to
ghelbig

Avnet do a few boards so I can't quite locate the particular device you are referring to. For example, the Xilinx=AE Virtex=99-II Pro FG456 Kit requires a JTAG adapter of some description to program it. I use a Xilinx Parallel Cable III for my development board. I don't know how much they are today from Xilinx as mine came with the rather expensive development software from Xilinx many years ago!

There is a design for a homebrew parallel cable on the web (see website

formatting link
I have not used this design before so I cannot say with any confidence that it works.

STOP: Before using homebrew programming cables - double check (no, triple check) the power supply arrangements. Getting +5V confused with

+3.3V will lead to lots of expensive, smelly smoke!

Dave

Reply to
daver2

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.