Waiting is over…

I got the new shining KC705 devkit today, which I ordered in early March.
I had mixed feelings, excited and a little bit disappointed.
Excited because I could pursue my interesting projects with the new gear.
Disappointed due to the facts that:

• BIST doesn’t work out of the box,by following exactly as what Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 Evaluation Kit Getting Started Guide (UG883 v1.1) says.
• the kit goes back to init state (init LED turns red) after a while in BIST setting.
• AMS doesn’t come with the box, and according to AR #46640, it will be shipped separately later.

I will focus on KC705 after getting other projects out of my hands, probably in several weeks.

KC705

The KC705 is the larger board in the bottom. I put the smaller SP605 in the middle to compare.

Thanks for Reading!

Friends, visiting to the blog crosses 10,000 hits today.

It’s been a little over 2 years now since my first post. Thanks for your reading, I will try my best to update here my FPGA related activities.

10,000 Hits!

Vivado HLS in Action

Check out this clip for Vivado HLS 2012.2 in action:

Notice how easily it is to apply different HLS directives to the same C code to improve frame rate from 2fps to 81fps.
You can see the exploding potentials of FPGA in software engineers’ hands.

Vivado 2012.1

When I installed ISE 14.1 System Edition, I found Vivado 2012.1 comes with it.

I will contact Xilinx and Avnet FAEs to see if I could get early access license.

Vivado 2012.1

I’m told Vivado public access will be in July.

Install Xilinx Cable Drivers on 32 bit Ubuntu

Xilinx released ISE 14.1 this week. Unfortunately Ubuntu is still not a supported OS platform. I have to go through the driver installation process again, but this time I documented what I did and hope it will be useful for Linux users of Xilinx design tools.

My 32 bit Ubuntu 10.04 VM is of version 2.6.32-38; ISE 14.1 is installed on a remote hfsplus mount. Since it is a virtual machine, I enabled X11 Forwarding via SSH on OS X host to allow GUI installation.

Install ISE 14.1

Install ISE 14.1 suite, including ISE, LabTools and SDK, without cable drivers. Run xsetup scripts as regular user. It took about 22 GB disk space on the remote mount.

Setup Environment, and Install Supporting Packages

The default Ubuntu shell is dash, a smaller but less feature-rich shell. I changed the shell to bash.
Point gmake to /usr/bin/make.
Some packages are required to compile driver:

• libusb-dev
• libftdi-dev
• build-essential
• libc6-dev
• fxload

Here’s my setup environment.

Environment and Packages

Build and Install Drivers

I followed the advice from George Smart:
Xilinx JTAG Linux
Here’s how I compiled and installed driver.

Compile and Install Driver

Connect FPGA Device via Platform Cable USB II

I’m using LX9 MicroBoard. There are 3 different ways connecting to JTAG.

JTAG	USB Device ID	Cable Speed (MHz) or Clock Frequency(100,000Hz)
Platform Cable USB II	03fd:0008	6MHz
Digilent Onboard Plugin	1443:0007	4m Hz
Digilent HS1	0403:6010	10m Hz

Here’s how I connected to FPGA.

Platform Cable USB II

Install Digilent Onboard Plugin Driver and Adept Driver for HS1

Here’s how to install Digilent drivers, and connect via Onboard Plugin port.

Install Digilent Drivers and Connect via Onboard JTAG

Connect FPGA Device via Digilent HS1

Connect to JTAG via HS1 is identical to Platform Cable.

Connect FPGA Device via Digilent HS1

Here’s how to use impact to connect, please notice JTAG clock frequency is listed.

Impact Connect via HS1

To Do

I have a 64 bit Fedora 14 Desktop. Get the drivers built and installed is much more challenging. I will report back if I could get it work.