Configuring FPGA & PROM with serial Cable (DB9)

I am trying to program my FPGA board without a Xilinx Parallel Cable.

I would like to able to program the FPGA using the Serial Cable and Serial Port (DB9).

Also I am not sure if I understand JTAG correctly, but is there a way to implement the JTAG interface on serial cable, the way the Xilinx XChecker Cable does. Isnt JTAG simply a translationof voltage logic levels.

I was not able to find a schematic for the Xchecker cable.

Any help is very much appreciated.

Thanks

Yaju Nagaonkar

==================================================== y a j u at B Y U edu Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Brigham Young University Provo Utah USA 84604

Reply to
Y Nagaonkar
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Yaju,

The xchecker cable has been obsolete for about 4 years. You will neither find it nor its schematic on the Xilinx web site.

Because the RS232 port has a standard communications protocol, doing boundary-scan operations through the xchecker entailed sending encoded command packets through the port to the cable where they were interpreted to perform specific functions. These included things like going to particular TAP states, pulsing TCK, and the like. So, in part, the answer to your question is "no, JTAG isn't simply a translationof voltage logic levels" JTAG is communications protocol that involves transitions through a 16 state controller. An implementation through an RS232 port would have to comprehend that. Also, I should note that boundary-scan control driven through RS232 is usually quite slow because of the overhead associated with the RS232 protocol and its speed and packet size limitations.

Y Naga>I am trying to program my FPGA board without a Xilinx Parallel Cable.

Reply to
Neil Glenn Jacobson

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