XST and TCL support?

I would imagine that it does; the Xilinx installer includes a tcl shell.

I hate how the tools dump things all over the place, too. Calling the various programs from a script can help with that but it's not ideal.

The GUI is useful for initial project set-up. Among other things, if you look carefully you'll see the exact command line for each of the various processes. The GUI is also helpful when creating constraints and for interactively driving the timing analyzer.

I've created a couple of makefiles (one for FPGAs, one for CPLDs) that I use under cygwin to synthesize and build my chips. "make cleanup" gets rid of all of the excess files and directories (I found a list of the files buried in the Xilinx docs). It took awhile to figure out what does what and where. I couldn't figure out what xflow was doing, so my makefile calls the individual programs as needed.

-a

There is .cmd_log file that logs every command was run.

Search for *.gfl file, which has a list of most (if not all) of the intermediate files.

HTH, Jim

Andy Peters schrieb:

Can anybody confirm that ISE can be run with a TCL script?

I was looking for that option and did not find anything?

I am using a Makefile now, but that is not enough, as the synthesis tool requires its own script files. What makes it even harder is the fact that one tool uses a different device specification format as the other.

For example, calling the map or ngbuild tool a Spartan 3 is given as: xc3s50-tq144-4. Where as in the synthesis script it needs to be specified as: xc3s50-4-tq144.

Having those different files makes it really tedious to do changes.

Guenter

Hi Brandon,

This doesn't help at all, but all Altera's design tools (even Altera's free Web Edition) have TCL scripting built-in. Altera even included matching Tk libs to build your own GUI.

Plus, the Quartus GUI will even generate a TCL file for your current project that compiles the whole design for you. Alternatively, you can also use some form of Make if you want.

All this is useless when targeting a Xilinx device, of course ;-)

Best regards,

Ben

Yeah. We decided to go the Xilinx route. Apparently no one thought it would be wise to ask me what synthesis tool to license.. Now we are stuck with XST, which I'd rather have avoided. I find it to be fairly dumbed down...

makefiles.. ugh.. i'm running away!

I suppose I'll have to dig around the Xilinx documentation to get into the nitty gritty details. Thanks all.

The other solution is bras. I was told about this yesterday. I've never used it, but it's a tcl build tool (like make, only not so messy).

Other folks have said that at least it's way better than make. It's good for all of those EDA folk who love their tcl.

-Arlen