Gang
I created a half dozen example projects using ISE 8.2i and the PicoBlaze on my S3-1600 Dev Board. I'm really comfortable with asm programming so the lack of a C compiler was no big deal. I am running under Windows XP SP2 on a dual cpu P6 @ 1.8GHz and 2GB of RAM.
Now I have started using the XPS 8.2i with ISE 8.2i so that I can do some MicroBlaze programming in C. I am creating some very simple hardware systems that consist of the CPU, a uart and some RAM. When I click the button to build the hardware bit stream it is taking 14 minutes to run. When I compile my C code it takes about 45 seconds to compile and then merge the ELF file with the hardware bit stream.
This 14 minute hw build time is totally unreasonable. I find myself not willing to experiment with changes to the hardware because the associated build times.
Am I doing something wrong? The entire hw and sw system is supposed to be based on MAKE files that only reprocess a file that has changed. The XPS environment depends on the ISE environment to create the hw bitstream. My initial ISE/PicoBlaze experiences were very nice (i.e. synthesis, map, place & route, etc were fast).
Is there a way to describe my MicroBlaze design without using the XPS? or am I crazy for thinking this way?
Any help would be appreciated.
Bob